Death row inmate Nicholas Todd Sutton has been moved into a cell next to Tennessee's execution chamber, where he is scheduled to die by electrocution Thursday night.
Sutton, 58, has been placed on death watch, a three-day period of increased supervision and security ahead of an inmate's execution date. He was transferred from his normal cell at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to one next to the death chamber shortly after midnight Tuesday, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction.
"Only those individuals who are on the offender’s official visitation list are allowed to visit the offender during the death watch period," reads a statement from the department. "All visits are non-contact until the final day before the execution at which time the warden decides if the offender can have a contact visit."
Sutton killed three people in 1979, when he was 18 years old. He didn't receive a death sentence until he fatally stabbed a fellow inmate in prison at age 23.
In December 1979, investigators determined Sutton knocked his 58-year-old grandmother unconscious and threw her into a river in East Tennessee's Hamblen County. Dorothy Sutton, a retired schoolteacher who had raised him like a son, drowned, an autopsy found.
After a jury convicted him of murder, Sutton confessed he had already killed John Large, his 19-year-old friend from high school, and Charles Almon, a 46-year-old Knoxville man. Sutton beat Large to death and buried his body in Waterville, North Carolina, in August 1979. He fatally shot Almon about two months later and dumped his body in a flooded rock quarry outside Newport, Tennessee.
Sutton took plea deals and received two more life sentences for those killings. He hadn't served five years in prison when he stabbed Carl Estep, a convicted child rapist from Knoxville, to death in a cell at Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility on Jan. 15, 1985. The two had been in a dispute over drugs.
Sutton ended up being charged with murder alongside two other inmates, one of whom was acquitted while the other received a life sentence and is now out on parole. Yet jurors convicted Sutton of first-degree murder and sentenced him to die, finding his history of violence and the nature of the killing to be aggravating circumstances that warranted the death penalty.
Attorneys challenging Sutton's death sentence over the decades have argued he was unconstitutionally shackled in front of jurors, and that his previous lawyers provided ineffective counsel because they did not introduce evidence showing Sutton was a drug-addicted teenager who suffered abuse at the hands of his mentally-ill father.
Clemency petition
In a clemency petition, Sutton's latest legal team urged Gov. Bill Lee to move Sutton off death row and allow him to serve life without parole instead. Current and former corrections officers lined up to support the bid for mercy, saying Sutton transformed himself into a model inmate who repeatedly saved lives by protecting prison staffers from inmate violence and caring for the sick on death row.
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Gov. Bill Lee and Tennessee reach a crossroads on the death penalty
The petition also says five jurors who sentenced Sutton to die now support a life sentence, and it includes statements from some of the relatives of some of his victims who feel the same way.
Lee has not said whether he will intervene. The governor has declined to stop three executions since he took office in 2019.
"We have not reached a decision there," Lee said of Sutton's case Tuesday. "There's more information — even came in today — but I'll be making that decision soon."
Howe knows how Sutton killed three times to land himself in prison, then killed again to earn a spot on death row. But it's hard for her to square those crimes with the man she knows — a Christian who worked as a maintenance man in prison, lovingly encouraged her son and regularly gifted her drawings, paintings and hand-crafted wooden boxes.
"That's not the person I know, I guess," she said. "I don't want to pretend it didn't happen. He's on death row. He's in prison. I understand he committed crimes, and I don't excuse that or forget that. I think there are consequences for our actions, and he certainly has had them. But I'm more interested, I think, in the person he is now, the fine example of a human being he is."
Howe visited Sutton on Monday along with her husband and Sutton's wife, to whom he's been married for 26 years.
"He is as good as can be expected. He is still hopeful that the governor will intercede but is preparing for things in case he doesn’t," Howe said. "He is grateful for all of the people who have shown support and love for him, and he knows that God is in this with him. If he does get executed, he knows he will be with God. And he finds comfort in that."
Sutton, one of dozens of death row inmates who argued Tennessee's lethal injection protocol amounts to state-sanctioned torture, has chosen to die in the electric chair. Tennessee's primary method of execution is lethal injection, but inmates convicted of crimes before 1999 can choose electrocution instead.
Sutton's execution is scheduled for 8 p.m. EST Thursday at Riverbend prison in Nashville.
He would be the fifth man executed by electrocution since 2018 and the first person ever put to death in Tennessee for killing a fellow inmate.
Source: knoxnews.com, Travis Dorman, February 18, 2020
Nick Sutton Chooses the Electric Chair for Feb. 20 Execution
Sutton is set to be the fifth Tennessee prisoner executed by electrocution since August 2018
If Nick Sutton is denied clemency by Gov. Bill Lee, he will be executed in the electric chair on Feb. 20. He's set to be the fifth Tennessee prisoner to choose electrocution over the state’s controversial lethal injection protocol since executions resumed in August 2018.
Like all Tennessee inmates sentenced to death before 1999 — when the state made lethal injection its primary method of execution — Sutton was legally entitled to choose between the two.
A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Correction confirms to the Scene that Sutton has chosen electrocution..
In 2018, the state adopted a three-drug lethal injection protocol that has been used in so-called botched executions in other states.
Thirty-three death row prisoners challenged that protocol in court, arguing that it would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
Medical experts have argued that the first of the three drugs — the sedative midazolam — is not sufficient to keep a condemned prisoner from feeling the excruciating effects of the second two drugs, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Vecuronium bromide is a paralytic, while potassium chloride stops the heart.
One leading anesthesiologist testified in court that vecuronium bromide would make a person feel like they were being buried alive while the potassium chloride that follows would make them feel as if they were being burned alive. The protocol, however, was upheld as constitutional.
Faced with that, the electric chair has become the method of choice for most Tennessee prisoners facing execution.
Sutton was sentenced to death in 1985 for stabbing fellow inmate Carl Estep to death.
By then, he was already serving a life sentence for killing his grandmother Dorothy when he was 18 years old, and he'd also been convicted of murdering Charles Almon and John Large in North Carolina at the same age.
But in Sutton's request for clemency, his attorneys say he “has gone from a life-taker to a life-saver.” Several former prison officers describe incidents in which Sutton saved their lives. He also has the support of members of his victims’ families.
Source:
nashvillescene.com, Steven Hale, January 22, 2020
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
