KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Gov. Bill Lee announced Wednesday he wouldn't stop the planned execution of death row inmate Nicholas Todd Sutton.
“After careful consideration of Nicholas Sutton’s request for clemency and a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and will not be intervening,” his statement reads.
Some family members of the victims of Sutton as well as prison workers had urged Lee to commute the sentence.
Sutton is to be electrocuted. He's declined the option of lethal injection. He's killed four people; he's on death row for killing an inmate in 1985 in Morgan County.
Tennessee inmates sentenced to death are almost certain to face execution. But there have been a few instances in which their lives were spared.
Two Tennessee governors have stepped in over the past 50 years or so.
Gov. Phil Bredesen used his authority three times while in office to intervene, most notably in the case of Gaile Owens, convicted in Shelby County of taking part in a murder plot against her husband.
Owens' case featured unique circumstances.
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She'd hired someone to kill her husband in 1985, and she'd also accepted a plea deal that would give her a life sentence in prison. But Owens' co-defendant refused to take the deal, so Owens had to go to trial, records show.
She ended up getting the death penalty in 1986. Owens stayed on death row 25 years. For a time, she was the only woman among about 100 inmates facing execution.
She was released in October 2011. Owens died at age 67 in November in Williamson County.
Bredesen also commuted the death sentences of Michael Boyd in 2007 and Jerome Harbison in 2011.
Lee, who took office in 2019, so far has declined several requests for clemency.
Gov. Bill Haslam also declined requests including one for Billy Ray Irick, who was put to death in August 2018 by lethal injection after a nine-year freeze on executions.
In March 1965, Gov. Frank Clement stepped in to reprieve five men on death row. He strongly opposed capital punishment.
No executions were conducted in Tennessee from 1961 until April 2000, when the state put Robert Coe to death for a rape and murder in Weakley County.
RELATED: Tennessee death row inmate Nicholas Sutton moved to death watch ahead of Thursday execution
Since then 11 men have died in the execution chamber:
*Sedley Alley in June 2006
*Phillip Workman in May 2007
*Daryl Holt in September 2007
*Steve Henley in February 2009
*Cecil Johnson in December 2009
*Billy Ray Irick in August 2018
*Edmund Zagorski in November 2018
*David Miller in December 2018
*Don Johnson in May 2019
*Stephen West in August 2019
*Lee Hall in December 2019