Tennessee will execute its sixth death row inmate Thursday night since a hiatus ended in 2018. The courts and Gov. Bill Lee have denied all of Lee Hall’s last-minute appeals thus far.
Now, Hall faces the electric chair. He’s the state’s fourth death row inmate to choose electrocution over lethal injection in the past year.
Tennessee is bucking multiple national trends when it comes to the death penalty. Not only is it one of just seven states to have executed someone this year, but it’s also the only place still actively using its electric chair.
Death row inmates in Tennessee can opt for electrocution if they were convicted of a crime committed before 1999. Several have recently made that choice, amid concerns about the state’s lethal injection protocol.
Edmund Zagorski was the first in the most recent round of executions to pick the electric chair, in November 2018. He’d brought a case to the federal Supreme Court, pleading for the Department of Correction to stay his execution, on the grounds that effects from the drugs would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
The court denied his request. But in a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized the state for “hasten[ing] to kill a prisoner despite mounting evidence that the sedative to be used, midazolam, will not prevent the prisoner from feeling as if he is ‘drowning, suffocating, and being burned alive from the inside out’ during a process that could last as long as 18 minutes.”
Hall is set to be executed at 7 p.m. at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Another execution is scheduled for February of next year, followed by two in April. Nine more executions could be scheduled in the coming months.
Samantha Max is a Report for America corps member.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM