Trigger Warning: This article contains graphic details about execution.
Death sentences (execution) are painful, confusing, and sad decisions that are made after prolonged periods of trials consisting of multiple hearings, evidence scrutiny, media judgments, and parole. Executions in the United States are stricter than in most countries, while the criminal surely suffers the most for the crimes they commit, it’s the families of the victims who learn to live with agony for the rest of their lives without their loved ones around them.
Hence, some heinous crimes deserve no mercy, and perhaps execution is the only way to get justice. While death by lethal injection is a standard method opted for regular executions in the country since 1976, due to resistance by drug manufacturers to provide the significant amount, certain states allow other methods like electrocution, the gas chamber, and firing squad methods if lethal injections aren’t available.
Tennessee death row inmate makes last-ditch effort to prevent Aug. 5 execution https://t.co/lqo6FLIiip
— WATE 6 On Your Side (@6News) July 3, 2025
As per The Associated Press, in Nashville’s Chancery Court, lawyers are now asking a judge to require the Tennessee Department of Corrections to deactivate Black’s implanted cardioverter-defibrillator immediately before execution. Similar to a pacemaker, the medical device is a small battery-powered device placed in the chest that correct dangerous heart rhythms by delivering electric shocks.
In the context of executions, particularly lethal injections, the presence of such a device might create complications.
The device will repeatedly restart his heart and risk prolonging his death, where Black might suffer unnecessarily. Since most medical professionals refuse to assist with executions due to ethical concerns, finding someone to disable the device could delay the process. A hearing on this issue is set for July 14, 2025. Byron Black was sentenced to death for killing his girlfriend, Angela Clay, and her two young daughters, ages 9 and 6, in the 1988 shootings.
Sources claim Black was in uncontrollable rage as he shot them three times. At the time, Black was on work release while serving time for shooting and poorly injuring Angela Clay’s estranged husband.
Byron Black’s execution has already been postponed three times—once due to the prolonged COVID‑19 pandemic and twice because the Department of Corrections failed to test execution drugs properly. Now, the lawyers are trying to delay his next execution date on August 5, 2025. At the Tennessee Supreme Court, Black’s lawyers have also petitioned for a review of his mental competence under old English common law standards.
His team believes Black is not mentally fit to comprehend the execution and is intellectually disabled. While those appeals have been rejected, media reports reveal that Byron Black’s legal team has challenged the state’s revised protocol. Still, that case isn’t likely to be resolved before Black’s scheduled date unless a delay is granted.
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About 28 states, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, and several others, including the U.S. Military and government, use the lethal injection method of execution. Several cases witness a deliberate delay in the proceedings, because, come on, nobody would wish to die, but as we said, some crimes that cross the basic humanistic level of existence require no mercy. Nobody has the right to take anyone’s life.
It is a big crime and will always be deemed to punishment in the eyes of the law.
