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Thread: Nicholas Todd Sutton - Tennessee Execution - February 20, 2020

  1. #31
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    Yep those are the ones. I know it sounds bad but hurry up and get stuck or get zapped Christa. Give somebody closure. Die! Ok you blanche chick, suffer! I got pudding!

  2. #32
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Tennessee death row guard says killer's sentence should stand

    NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) - On Thursday, a former Tennessee death row prison guard spoke to NewsChannel 5, asking Gov. Bill Lee to change the sentence of death row inmate Nick Sutton to life in prison, saying Sutton makes the prison safer for other inmates and officers. But now a fellow former Riverbend prison guard says he believes Sutton should remain on death row.

    Joel Rader says he has a tremendous amount of respect for Hugh Rushton, the former prison guard who spoke to NewsChannel 5 on Thursday. But Rader says he disagrees with Rushton on whether Sutton should be taken off death row.

    Sutton is scheduled to be executed in the electric chair on Thursday. He was convicted of killing four people in the 1980s, including his own grandmother.

    Sutton's attorneys say he's turned his life around. They claim Sutton has saved the lives of prison guards while on death row, including one who was taken hostage during a riot at the old Tennessee State Prison in 1985.

    According to Rader, who knew Sutton during his time working at Riverbend prison from 2002 to 2011, if Lee commutes Sutton's sentence to life in prison, he'd move into the general Riverbend prison population, a place Rader says is far less stable than death row.

    "If you go to other units on the Riverbend compound, there's more violent activity in those units than what you'll find on death row," Rader said.

    To land on death row, Sutton killed a fellow inmate in Morgan County while behind bars for three other murders. Rader says moving Sutton back to that general prison population would be too risky.

    "He's forced himself upon someone before, took their life, you want to give them another chance to do that again?" Rader said.

    Despite Sutton's actions during the 1985 prison riot, Rader says reducing Sutton's sentence would begin a slippery slope for all other inmates.

    "If Nick Sutton does a good thing, and you commute his sentence to life, well, if an inmate in prison for life does something good, are you going reduce his sentence?" Rader said. "Because that's what you're starting."

    Rader says the jury's verdict in Sutton's original capital trial should be allowed to stand.

    Rader says, the jury's verdict as part of the legal system should stand.

    "If you start questioning that system, that's when it becomes broken," Rader said. "I don't know if there is a way to say, 'hey, this man is OK to come off death row.' I don't believe there is."

    Sutton's attorneys have argued the jury that sentenced him to death was biased because jurors could see shackles on Sutton throughout his trial, but judges have not been convinced.

    On Friday, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied to stop Sutton's execution.

    https://www.newschannel5.com/news/te...e-should-stand
    "How do you get drunk on death row?" - Werner Herzog

    "When we get fruit, we get the juice and water. I ferment for a week! It tastes like chalk, it's nasty" - Blaine Keith Milam #999558 Texas Death Row

  3. #33
    Senior Member Frequent Poster joe_con's Avatar
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    Sounds to me like he saved one life, but took four lives. Just from a mathematical viewpoint: saved one live=took one live, he still owes for three lives so he should be executed mathematically speaking. I am no mathematician though

  4. #34
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    They are also claiming he should be spared because he helped take care of Charles Wright and Lee Hall. As if that matters

  5. #35
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Ted's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bobsicles View Post
    They are also claiming he should be spared because he helped take care of Charles Wright and Lee Hall. As if that matters
    I mean, statistically speaking they weren’t lives saved either
    Violence and death seem to be the only answers that some people understand.

  6. #36
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    Death row inmate Nick Sutton moved to death watch ahead of Thursday execution

    By Travis Dorman
    Knoxville Sentinel

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Amy Howe, a retired minister and anti-death penalty advocate, met Sutton through a death penalty visitation program 14 years ago. Now she calls him a friend.

    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.

    https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/...on/4770742002/
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  7. #37
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    I did see that Sutton was moved to death watch sometime today. Another way of saying that he is another step closer to kicking the bucket, buying the Buick and dropping the clog! Zap a dee do da, zap a dee ay. Ok that was bad but if he didn't kill, he would not be this close to getting killed. I-4-I! Tooth for tooth, etc. He still has many more constitutional rights than he took away.

  8. #38
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    Nicholas Sutton has been denied clemency

    https://twitter.com/tennessean/statu...147742208?s=21
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  9. #39
    Senior Member Frequent Poster joe_con's Avatar
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    Inmate's unusual group of supporters seeks to stop execution

    By TRAVIS LOLLER
    The Associated Press

    NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Death row inmate Nick Sutton has an unusual group of supporters seeking to block his scheduled execution Thursday. Among them are family members of his victims and past and present prison workers calling for clemency.

    Sutton, 58, was sentenced to death in 1986 for killing fellow inmate Carl Estep in a conflict over a drug deal while both were incarcerated in an East Tennessee prison. Unless the governor or the courts intervene, Sutton is to be put to death Thursday evening in the electric chair.

    Estep’s oldest daughter said Sutton did her family a favor.

    “To say that was the best day of my life is an understatement,” Rosemary Hall said of her father’s death in a statement included in Sutton’s clemency petition. “I felt as though a 100-pound weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I thought to myself, ‘There is a God!'"

    She called Estep an “evil man” and accused him of setting their house on fire and deliberately causing a traffic accident that killed her baby sister. Estep was in prison for raping Hall’s stepsister when Sutton killed him, she said.

    Although Sutton drew the death penalty for Estep’s murder, he was already serving time for three murders he committed in 1979 when he was just 18, including that of his grandmother. In the clemency petition, longtime friends describe a childhood marked by abandonment, abuse and neglect, and later a spiral into drug abuse.

    But a recurring theme in the statements supporting the clemency petition is that Sutton today is not the same man who went prison at 18.

    “I can confidently state that Nick Sutton is the most rehabilitated prisoner that I met working in maximum security prisons over the course of 30 years,” former Correction Lt. Tony Eden stated in an affidavit included with the clemency petition.

    Eden believes Sutton may have saved his life during a prison riot in 1985 by confronting a group of armed inmates who were trying to take Eden hostage.

    “If Nick Sutton was released tomorrow, I would welcome him into my home and invite him to be my neighbor,” Eden wrote.

    Former counselor Cheryl Donaldson also believes Sutton may have saved her life when he sprang into action and called for help after she slipped and hit her head hard on a concrete prison floor.

    Donaldson also described how her own brother's killing prompted a very frank conversation with Sutton.

    “Nick told me he deeply regretted his crimes, constantly reflected on his wrongs, his victims and their families, and is haunted by the lives he has taken," Donaldson stated.

    The mother of Paul House, a former death row inmate who was later freed when a judge overturned his conviction based on new evidence, said she is doing all she can to advocate for Sutton. She said Sutton cared for her son after he developed multiple sclerosis in prison, including helping him eat and shower.

    “I’m telling you right now, my son would be dead if it wasn’t for Nick,” Joyce House said in a telephone interview.

    Relatives of another of Sutton's victims, Charles Almon, are also requesting clemency. Almon's nephew and namesake, Charles Maynard, said his close-knit family never got over his uncle's death, but the past few months have been especially painful as Sutton's execution date approaches.

    Maynard said he doesn't feel executing Sutton would solve anything. "It just ends my uncle's story with another killing," Maynard said in a phone interview.

    He said he and his daughter Anna Lee are considering attending a vigil to be held by Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty if the execution goes forward. Lee, who is a Methodist minister in Knoxville, said her faith informs how she sees the execution.

    “I have a deep belief in the sanctity and sacredness of human life, and I believe no life is beyond the redemption of God's grace," she said.

    Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who is not related to Anna Lee, is a devout Christian who often speaks of his faith. But so far, it has not led him to commute the sentences of three men executed since he took office, including one who became a devout Christian and religious leader while in prison.

    Sutton is scheduled to be executed at a Nashville maximum security prison Thursday evening unless Lee grants himclemency. Sutton was moved to a cell next to the death chamber Tuesday and put under 24-hour surveillance.

    Sutton has chosen to die in the electric chair, an option in Tennessee for prisoners whose crimes were committed before 1999. If executed, Sutton would be the fifth person to die in the state's electric chair in the past 16 months.

    Sutton still has an appeal pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that questions the fairness of his sentencing.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime...cid=spartanntp
    Last edited by joe_con; 02-19-2020 at 04:49 PM. Reason: Bolding

  10. #40
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Alfred's Avatar
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    Tennessee death row inmate Nicholas Sutton chooses last meal before scheduled execution

    Sutton, 58, ordered fried pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy and peach pie with vanilla ice cream, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction. He will receive the meal ahead of his scheduled execution Thursday night.

    Death row inmates in Tennessee typically have a $20 limit for their last meal.

    https://eu.knoxnews.com/story/news/c...al/4770745002/

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