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

  1. #11
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    The reason that Sutton and Thomas Street killed Estep wasn't because he was a pedophile. It was because he was the prison's reefer dealer, they robbed and murdered him for his stash and cash.

    Charles Freeman who was fingered in the murder was acquitted at trial and Street was sentenced to life but as of now he has been paroled.

    http://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/sutt...holas-todd.htm
    Last edited by Mike; 02-20-2020 at 11:22 PM.

  2. #12
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Tennessee death row inmates seek firing squad as alternative to electric chair, lethal injection

    Lawyers for four Tennessee death row inmates are asking a federal judge to allow them to choose a firing squad as an alternative to Tennessee's lethal injection or electric chair execution methods.

    The inmates filing suit include David Earl Miller, the next man set to die in Tennessee for his crimes.

    Miller, sentenced to death for the 1981 rape and murder of 23-year-old Lee Standifer in Knoxville, is scheduled to be executed December 6.

    The suit asks the court to postpone Miller's execution until the court can hear the case.

    Miller, under Tennessee's protocol, will be asked to select his method of execution on Tuesday — 30 days before his execution date.

    The lawsuit asks the court to temporarily stop state officials from presenting Miller with that choice.

    The lawsuit was filed a day after 63-year-old Edmund Zagorski was executed by electric chair for the 1983 murders of John Dotson and Jimmy Porter in Robertson County.

    Before his death, attorneys for Zagorski filed multiple challenges to his execution.

    They won one: Zagorski was granted the right to choose the chair after his legal challenge to Tennessee’s three-drug lethal injection protocol failed. His attorneys argued death by electrocution would be quicker, but maintained that both methods are unconstitutional.

    On August 9, the lethal injection execution of Billy Ray Irick took at least 20 minutes to complete.

    In the suit, lawyers for Miller and three other death row inmates — Nicholas Todd Sutton, Stephen Michael West and Terry Lynn King — argued that the state's electric chair "is sure or very likely to inflict a gruesome and torturous death" since the state fails to take into account the difference between individual prisoners that include pain thresholds and the varying amounts of current required to cause unconsciousness.

    Miller, Sutton and West previously filed suit on Aug. 21 seeking alternatives to Tennessee's lethal drug execution method, but voluntarily dismissed their suit amid other ongoing challenges to Tennessee's execution methods by attorneys for Zagorski.

    The suit says that the state possesses the firearms, ammunition and trained personnel necessary to carry out a firing squad execution. The suit says that Big Buck Shooting Range, on the grounds of Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, can "easily accommodate what little equipment is required for an execution by firing squad."

    Trained professionals reduce error rates in firing-squad executions, the suit claims. Should there be human error, procedure for military executions have a back-up plan: the "coup de grace," which consists of holding the muzzle of a handgun "just above the ear and one foot from the head" to complete the execution, according to the lawsuit filed late Friday.

    "The firing squad significantly reduces a substantial risk of unnecessary and severe pain when compared with" Tennessee's three-drug cocktail used in lethal injections, sparing the men suffocation, internal chemical burn and paralysis.

    Other alternatives

    If the court rules against the firing squad, the lawsuit suggests the following alternative methods of execution:

    Orally administering the drugs: This method suggests there are medications that could be administered orally instead of through injection in sweet liquids, such as fruit juice.

    Pentobarbital: Other states, including Texas, use the drug. Although Tennessee prison officials have said they can't obtain it, attorneys here argue they haven't tried hard enough.

    Removing the vecuronium bromide: Simply removing the second drug from the current three-drug method would reduce the chance the offender is tortured, according to the lawsuit. Attorneys tried to raise this argument late in Irick's legal proceedings as well.

    The suit also seeks an order allowing two defense lawyers to be present during any execution to ensure that should one attorney leave the room to use a phone, the second attorney can be allowed to communicate the conditions inside the room.

    Three states allow firing squad

    Only Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah formally authorize the use of a firing squad, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Utah officials executed an inmate by firing squad in 2010, the most recent usage in the United States.

    Tennessee, like most other states that allow the death penalty, uses lethal injection as the primary means of execution. If the state certifies it can't find lethal injection drugs, or if a court determines lethal injection is unconstitutional, then Tennessee can use the electric chair.

    If a court determines the electric chair is unconstitutional, then the state is allowed to carry out executions via "any constitutional method." In theory, that could mean a firing squad, but that would require several significant court rulings.

    In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court denied an Alabama offender's request to die by a firing squad instead of lethal injection. However, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer dissented with the majority of the court.

    "Even if a prisoner can prove that the state plans to kill him in an intolerably cruel manner, and even if he can prove that there is a feasible alternative, all a state has to do to execute him through an unconstitutional method is to pass a statute declining to authorize any alternative method," Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, as reported by USA TODAY. "This cannot be right."

    https://eu.tennessean.com/story/news...ad/1893264002/

  3. #13
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Tennessee Supreme Court sets execution dates for six inmates

    Dec. 5, 2019, is the new execution date for Lee Hall, also known as Leroy Hall Jr. He was convicted of murder in the burning death of his girlfriend Traci Crozier.

    The other defendants and their execution dates are Donnie Edward Johnson, May 16, 2019, convicted in 1985 of killing his wife Connie Johnson in Shelby County; Stephen Michael West, Aug. 15, 2019, convicted of the murder of Wanda Romines and the rape and murder of Sheila Romines in Union County; Charles Walton Wright, Oct. 10, 2019, convicted in 1984 of the murders of Gerald Mitchell and Douglas Alexander in Davidson County; Nicholas Todd Sutton, Feb. 20, 2020, convicted in 1985 of the murder of Carl Estep in Morgan County; and Abu-Ali Abdur' Rahman, formerly known as James Lee Jones, April 9, 2020, convicted of the 1986 murder of Patrick Daniels in Davidson County.

    https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/...nmates/483217/
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

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  4. #14
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    More on Sutton's Crimes

    Edited out redundant info on execution dates being set.

    Date set for Sutton’s execution

    Citizen Tribune

    Earlier this year Attorney General Herbert Slatery called for execution dates for eight inmates on Tennessee’s death row, including Sutton, whose 2015 execution date was delayed.

    Sutton, 57, has twice been convicted of capital murder.

    The first death sentence came in connection with the death of Knoxville contractor Charles P. Almon III, 46, in late 1979.

    Almon’s body was wrapped in a sheet, chained to a concrete block, then thrown into a rock quarry off Golf Course Road outside of Newport.

    The defendant was sentenced to death by electrocution in connection with Almon’s killing, but the method was changed to lethal injection when Tennessee’s law changed to require lethal injection as Tennessee’s sole method of execution.

    Sutton also was sentenced to death for the stabbing death of fellow inmate Carl Estep in 1985, at the Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility in Wartburg, Tennessee.

    Sutton has a long history of criminal activities.

    In 1980, at the age of 18, Sutton was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his grandmother. Fifty-eight-year-old Dorothy Sutton, a retired teacher of Morristown, was severely beaten, wrapped in a sheet tied with tire chains and a cinder block, and then thrown into the Nolichucky River in December 1979.

    She reportedly died of drowning. Sutton had beaten her with a piece of firewood after she discovered that he had earlier murdered two men.

    He was eligible for parole after 30 years.

    Two weeks after he was convicted, in April, 1980, Sutton led investigators to the grave of John M. Large, 19, of Morristown, a boyhood friend, near his aunt’s cabin at Mt. Sterling, N.C. Sutton not only killed Large, and buried him in a shallow grave; a tobacco stake was driven through the mouth of the victim to mark the location of the grave.

    He reported had been killed in July, 1978.

    The plea agreement in the Large death provided for Sutton to serve a sentence concurrently with the sentence imposed for the killing of Mrs. Sutton.

    Later divers looking for the body of an unrelated murder victim found the body of Almon in 90 feet of water in the Cocke County quarry.

    It was adjacent to a car which investigators said had been stolen in Hamblen County by Sutton, two weeks earlier.

    Almon reportedly had been killed near Mt. Sterling in late 1979 and taken to the Newport quarry three weeks later.

    The skulls of all three victims had been crushed, and according to investigators,

    In January of 1985, Nicholas Sutton, along with inmates Thomas Street and Charles Freeman, entered the cell of Carl Estep.

    Other inmates observed the three entering the cell and heard Estep scream while the three were inside the cell. Guards discovered Estep had been stabbed 38 times.

    Sutton was sentenced to death for the stabbing.

    https://www.citizentribune.com/news/...cc1d1feb7.html

  5. #15
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Who's next to be executed from East Tennessee? Two more await dates in death chamber

    The Tennessee Supreme Court has set execution dates for two more inmates from East Tennessee — one this year and one in 2020. That number doesn't include the four left from Knox County who still wait for their sentences to be carried out.

    Because each of the pair committed his crime in the years before Tennessee changed execution methods in 1999, each will get the choice between lethal injection and electrocution.

    Leroy Hall Jr. : December 5, 2019

    Leroy Hall, Jr. and his girlfriend couldn't get along. The last time they argued, he sloshed her with gasoline and set her and her car on fire.

    Traci Crozier lived long enough to tell Chattanooga police who threw a burning 2-gallon jug of gas at her the night of April 16, 1991. She suffered burns over 95 percent of her body and died of what emergency-room doctors at Erlanger Hospital called the worst injuries they'd ever seen.

    Hall at first denied he'd thrown the firebomb at Crozier, then insisted she only burned because she ignored him when he threw it and told her to get out of the way. He loved her, he said — he just wanted to burn her car. Never mind he'd left messages on her answering machine threatening to kill her exactly the way she died.

    A Hamilton County jury found Hall guilty in 1992 of first-degree murder and aggravated arson. He's set to die December 5.

    Nicholas Todd Sutton : February 20, 2020

    Nicholas Todd "Nicky" Sutton wasn't old enough to buy a beer the first time he killed — or the second, or the third. None of those got him the death penalty.

    Sutton was 18 when he knocked his grandmother, a retired elementary school teacher, unconscious with a stick of firewood, wrapped her in a blanket and trash bags, chained her to a cinder block and threw her alive into the Nolichucky River from Hale's Bridge in Hamblen County's Lowland community three days before Christmas Day 1979. She drowned in the icy waters, an autopsy found.

    Dorothy Sutton, 58, had made the mistake of telling her grandson no when he asked for money, prosecutors said. She might also have discovered he'd already killed two other people — John Large, a childhood friend, and Charles P. Almon, a bankrupt Knoxville contractor.

    Dorothy Sutton's daughter reported her missing when she didn't show up for dinner on Christmas Day. The grandson at first claimed she'd disappeared, but the various stories he told deputies fell apart fast. Searchers pulled her body from the river Dec. 29.

    Sutton eventually led authorities to Large's body after a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in his grandmother's death and sentenced him to life in prison. He'd killed Large, 19, on a trip to Mount Sterling, N.C., and buried his body in a shallow grave on property that belonged to Sutton's aunt.

    In October 1979, he shot Almon and dumped his body in a North Carolina quarry. Searchers found that corpse only after spending thousands of dollars searching in other spots as Sutton, who loved the attention, spun first one confession, then another.

    Investigators learned to recognize what they called the "Sutton signature" — bodies wrapped in plastic, bound in chains and weighted with cinder blocks. He claimed he'd killed five people in all, but two of the stories he told never yielded bodies, missing-person reports or other hard evidence.

    Sutton hadn't served five years when he helped stab Carl Isaac Estep, a convicted child rapist from Knoxville, more than three dozen times January 5, 1985, in a cell at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary in Morgan County. This time a jury sentenced Sutton to death. He's set to die February 20.

    https://eu.knoxnews.com/story/news/c...ll/1986700001/
    "How do you get drunk on death row?" - Werner Herzog

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  6. #16
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Tennessee inmates ask court to stop execution scheduling, argue death penalty rooted in racism

    NASHVILLE - One African American defendant was forced by a judge to represent himself at trial. Another was shackled in front of an all white jury during a sentencing hearing. And a third black defendant facing the death penalty is intellectually disabled.

    Those are some of the arguments made by defence attorneys in documents filed this week with the state U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to stem the pace of executions in Tennessee, which has surged to the forefront nationally in its application of the death penalty. They also argue Tennessee's use of capital punishment is rooted in a racist past and is still plagued with inherent racism.

    Attorney General Herbert Slatery is seeking to set dates for the nine death row inmates, all men, to die. Four of the nine are African American. Attorneys for the inmates point out that the justices could keep Tennessee moving in the opposite direction of the country as a whole or could join the ranks of most states in trending away from executions.

    "While the standards of decency of the nation as a whole have evolved towards rejection of the death penalty, Tennessee has fallen out of step with the rest of the country -- particularly in the last eighteen months, during which the State has executed six of its citizens at a rate not seen since before 1960," attorneys for the inmates wrote.

    One of the inmates facing a possible execution date, Tony Carruthers, would be the first person in about a century to be put to death after being forced to represent himself at trial, supervisory assistant federal public defender Kelley Henry wrote in a filing.

    Carruthers and another man were convicted of the 1994 killing of three people in an attempt to corner the illegal drug trade in their Memphis neighbourhood.

    The trial judge refused to appoint another attorney after Carruthers, whose attorneys describe him as severely mentally ill, ran off about a half-dozen lawyers with threats or lack of co-operation, the filing said. A court has never weighed in on whether Carruthers' self-representation was constitutionally adequate, Henry wrote.

    Farris Morris, an African American man convicted of a 1994 double murder and rape, was shackled during his sentencing trial in sight of an all-white panel of jurors, according to the filing that seeks to block an execution date for him. Two jurors noted the shackles in affidavits, but a court said after his conviction that nothing in the trial record showed he was visibly shackled in front of jurors, the filing states.

    In the case of Pervis Payne, who is also African American, defence attorneys sought a court order last month to find out about evidence they now want tested for DNA: a bloody comforter, bloody sheets and a bloody pillow. Payne, who has maintained his innocence, was convicted of murder for the 1987 deaths of a woman and her 2-year-old daughter. Additionally, his attorney wrote that his execution would be illegal because he's intellectually disabled.

    Tennessee resumed executions in August 2018, and four of the six prisoners put to death since have chosen the electric chair, a method no other state has used since 2009.

    Another execution is scheduled for February, where Nicholas Todd Sutton is to be executed if Gov. Bill Lee doesn't intervene in the case.

    Slatery's office has said the motion to set execution dates "is not a prerogative" and "is required by state law," citing a state Supreme Court rule that the attorney general "shall file a motion requesting that this Court set an execution date" after the prisoner fails in at least one challenge within each of the three tiers of death penalty appeals.

    The rule doesn't specify how quickly the attorney general has to request execution dates.

    Slatery requested all nine execution dates on the same day in September he sought to reinstate a death sentence for Abu-Ali Abdur' Rahman, a black man who was resentenced to life in prison in August after raising claims that racism tainted the jury selection process. The state Supreme Court has since stayed his execution date of April 2020.

    Beyond the individual cases, the death row inmates' attorneys contend that Tennessee's application of the death penalty shows "the overt racism that led to the lynching of black citizens became ingrained in the justice system."

    They cited statistics that show African Americans make up 17% of the state's population, but about half of its death row inmates.

    There also is a geographic disparity: since 2001, only eight of Tennessee's 95 counties have imposed sustained death sentences. Almost half of the men on death row are from Shelby County, which includes Memphis and is Tennessee's largest county, but only includes less than 14% of the state population, the filing said.

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/tenness...cism-1.4753101
    "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

  7. #17
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Lawyer: Tennessee death row inmate went from life-taker to lifesaver

    Associated Press

    Tennessee death row inmate Nicholas Sutton should be spared from execution because he transformed himself in prison from a killer to someone who saved the lives of prison employees and fellow inmates, his attorneys argue in a clemency petition.

    Sutton was sentenced to death in 1985 for stabbing fellow inmate Carl Estep to death after a confrontation over a drug deal. Sutton, now 58, was 23 years old at the time and already serving a life sentence for killing his grandmother when he was 18 years old.

    He had also been convicted of murdering Charles Almon and John Large in North Carolina when he was 18.

    The petition sent to Gov. Bill Lee on Tuesday, a little more than a month before Sutton’s scheduled execution date of Feb. 20, says that Sutton takes responsibility for these deaths and is “profoundly remorseful.” While the petition says Sutton makes no justification for the murders, his attorneys point out that he was raised by a violent, abusive and mentally ill father who introduced him to drugs at the age of 12.

    Death row was the first stable environment Sutton had ever lived in, his attorneys argue, and it also allowed him to get off drugs for the first time in many years. Sobriety and stability allowed Sutton to better himself and transform his life, they argue.

    “Nick Sutton has gone from a life-taker to a life-saver. Five Tennesseans, including three prison staff members, owe their lives to him,” the petition states.

    Former Correction Lt. Tony Eden is quoted as saying that Sutton saved his life during a 1985 prison riot when Eden was surrounded by a group of armed inmates who tried to take him hostage.

    “Nick and another inmate confronted them, physically removed me from the situation and escorted me” to safety, Eden says in the petition.

    Cheryl Donaldson, a former manager of Tennessee’s death row unit, recalls in the petition that in 1994 she slipped and hit her head hard on the floor. Sutton “sprang into action, helped me to my feet, retrieved my keys and radio, and alerted staff to come to my assistance,” she says.

    The petition also recounts the story of former Hamblen County Sheriff’s Deputy Howard Ferrell, now deceased, who said that in 1979 Sutton stopped another inmate from attacking him from behind as he was trying to break up a fight.

    And the petition includes statements from the mother of Paul House, a fellow inmate who was released after many years on death row. House developed multiple sclerosis in prison but was denied a wheelchair or walker, so Sutton carried him around the prison, Joyce House says.

    She credits Sutton’s care with saving her son’s life.

    “As a mother, it was so difficult not to be able to care for my son. I owe so much to Nick for providing Paul with the care that I was unable to give him,” she says in the petition.

    The petition also says inmate Pervis Payne credits Sutton’s quick action in calling for medical assistance with saving his life after he fell ill from a punctured intestinal tract.

    In addition to stressing his rehabilitation, the petition makes several legal arguments for commuting Sutton’s sentence. They include the fact that Sutton was visibly shackled and handcuffed during his 1985 trial. Attorneys quote a U.S. Supreme Court decision that found shackling “undermines the presumption of innocence.”

    Sutton’s current attorneys also fault his previous counsel for not presenting his history of childhood trauma and abuse as mitigating factors for the jury to consider. And they point out that Sutton was offered a life sentence by prosecutors, but only if a codefendant pleaded guilty and accepted a 30-40 year sentence. That codefendant was later acquitted by a jury.

    https://www.wkrn.com/news/lawyer-ten...-to-lifesaver/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  8. #18
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    The trend continues

    TENNESSEE DEATH ROW INMATE NICHOLAS SUTTON CHOOSES TO DIE IN THE ELECTRIC CHAIR

    NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The next death row inmate scheduled to be executed in Tennessee has chosen to die in the electric chair.

    Nicholas Todd Sutton, 58, was sentenced to death in 1985 for the murder of a fellow inmate at the Morgan County Correctional Facility. The victim, Carl Estep, was stabbed 38 times.

    Sutton was already serving a life sentence for killing his grandmother, Dorothy Sutton, when he was 18 years old, and he also has been convicted of killing two men in North Carolina, John Large and Charles Almon, also when he was 18.

    Sutton is set to be executed Feb. 20, though his lawyers are asking for clemency from Gov. Bill Lee because they say he has saved the lives of other inmates since he's been in prison. The governor hasn't responded so far.

    Because he was sentenced to death before 1999, Sutton is able to choose the method of his own execution.

    Four of the last five inmates executed in Tennessee chose the electric chair over lethal injection.

    Tennessee inmates have unsuccessfully argued in court that the way the state carries out lethal injection results in a prolonged and agonizing death. They say one of the drugs administered to inmates during the process ends up essentially torturing the inmate.

    The state Department of Correction resumed holding executions in August 2018, putting Billy Ray Irick of Knoxville to death by lethal injection.

    Tennessee has pursued a steady schedule of executions ever since.

    After Sutton, the next execution is set for June 4. Oscar Franklin Smith faces the death penalty for the 1989 murders of Judith Lynn Smith, 35, Chad Burnett, 16, and Jason Burnett, 13, in Nashville.

    On Aug. 4, the state is set for put to death Harold Wayne Nichols for the 1988 rape and murder of Karen Pulley, 21, in Chattanooga.

    https://www.wbir.com/amp/article/new...b-b21ef057a3dc
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  9. #19
    Senior Member CnCP Addict johncocacola's Avatar
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    I wonder if this will convince courts it's constitutional.

  10. #20
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Neil's Avatar
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    Probably not I am glad though, he’s getting a more gruesome death. After 32 years on death row, he deserves to die a more painful death. Lethal injection would’ve been too easy.
    Last edited by Neil; 01-22-2020 at 08:51 PM.

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