Tennessee scheduled to execute at least two more death row inmates this year

Mark HumphreyAP Photo

Tennessee has resumed executions after years of COVID-19 delays and administrative pauses, and three more are scheduled this year.

Earlier this year, the Tennessee Supreme Court set four execution dates.

Oscar Franklin Smith was the first to be scheduled. Last week, he became the first to undergo lethal injection under the Department of Correction’s latest protocol.

The next man to be put to death is Byron Black, who was convicted of killing his girlfriend and her two daughters in 1989.

He’s scheduled to die in August. Black has an intellectual disability. In 2021, state lawmakers made it easier for the courts to review death sentences for Tennesseans with these disabilities. However, the judge on Black’s case refused to reduce his sentence, according to reporting by The Tennessean.

The courts have paused the execution of another man — Daniel Middlebrooks — as part of an ongoing federal lawsuit challenging the lethal injection process.

That is separate from the lawsuit underway in Davidson County court, where attorneys for nine death row inmates argue their clients stand to have their constitutional rights violated in several ways — both by the written protocol’s alleged shortcomings and by the kind of widespread mismanagement that has been reported within TDOC.