Nick Sutton was not sober or free from abuse until he came to Tennessee's death row.
Not that a bed at the old fortress-like Tennessee State Prison, where he arrived in 1985, necessarily brought relief. The Walls, as it was known, was a grim place that was eventually condemned itself and deemed unfit even for society's castoffs.
But the relative stability of institutionalized life — particularly on death row, where violence between prisoners is more rare — allowed Sutton to kick his addictions and begin the long process of calming a mind still reeling from the turbulence of his childhood. Thirty-five years later, Sutton is set to be executed Thursday night in the electric chair. Like many of the people who have gone to Tennessee's death chamber before him, Sutton has spent much of his life in the custody of people who mean to treat him either with neglect or brutality.
RELATED | The execution of Nick Sutton
Sutton's mother abandoned him shortly after his birth. As a toddler he spent several years with one set of grandparents before moving in with the other, and reuniting with his father, Anderson "Pete" Sutton, who was mentally ill, addicted to alcohol and drugs, and violent. Nick's cousin Lowell is quoted in Sutton's clemency petition describing Pete, whose “idea of parenting generally consisted of yelling at, beating, and terrorizing his son.” When Pete wasn't absent from his son's life, he represented a storm bearing down on the young boy. Nick was known to show up at school with severe injuries. According to the clemency materials provided by Sutton's attorneys, Lowell recalls one incident in which "Pete beat Nick so badly that he broke his arm and another time where Pete flew into a rage and took Nick and Aunt Dorothy hostage at gunpoint, resulting in an armed stand-off with the police."
During this time period, Nick's father began encouraging him to use drugs himself. By the time Sutton was 12 years old, he and his father were regularly drinking and using drugs together whenever Pete wasn't at a psychiatric hospital or a prison.
When Nick was a teenager, his father was found dead in the family's yard from hypothermia and exposure. He'd apparently been drinking.
This childhood trauma, and the documented effect it had not just on Sutton's social and emotional health but on his developing brain, is perhaps the thing he has most in common with his fellow death row prisoners aside from their shared address. If his execution proceeds as planned, he will be the seventh man executed by the state of Tennessee since August 2018. The men who have gone before him all suffered from abuse and neglect. Billy Ray Irick was first sent to a mental health institution when he was just 6 years old, and a neighbor once saw his father hit him over the head with a 2-by-4. Stephen West was born in the mental health institution where his mother had been placed after she attempted suicide while pregnant with him. West's aunt once witnessed his mother grab him by the feet and sling him against the wall until he bled and threw up. David Earl Miller was raped and assaulted as a child by his mother, who would also whip him with a belt, an extension cord, a wire coat hanger or an umbrella. The stories all begin to run together like one toxic soup.
Of course those facts don't erase the ones that came after them. In Sutton's case, he murdered three people — John Large, Charles Almon and Dorothy Sutton. The latter of whom was Nick's grandmother, who he'd seen assaulted repeatedly by his father. Investigators reportedly concluded that Sutton knocked her out with a piece of wood, wrapped her in a blanket and trash bags, chained her to a cinder block and threw her into a river while she was still alive. He was five years into a life sentence for those murders when he was charged in the fatal stabbing of a fellow prisoner, Carl Estep, who'd been convicted of raping a 9-year-old girl. Estep had threatened Sutton's life during an ongoing dispute in the crowded and notoriously unstable Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility.
In his clemency petition, Sutton's attorney writes that prosecutors initially offered Sutton a life sentence in exchange for a guilty plea. But the deal was contingent upon one of Sutton's co-defendants also entering a guilty plea and accepting a decades-long sentence. Sutton refused the offer because he insisted the other prisoner was "minimally involved" in the stabbing. One of Sutton's co-defendants was acquitted and the other has since been released from prison on parole.
Given the details of Sutton's crimes, many Tennesseans will no doubt agree with the governor's decision to refuse him mercy, insisting that Sutton is not a victim. But mercy is for the guilty, and Nick Sutton is also a victim. He was abused before he abused, attacked before he attacked, and treated inhumanely before he disregarded the humanity of others. They aren't excuses, but they are facts. And it is impossible to resist the thought that if they could be taken away he would not be headed to the electric chair tonight.
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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
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde