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Nicky Sutton and lethal injection A majority of the Tennessee Supreme Court held Monday that death row inmates failed to establish that the current, three-drug lethal injection protocol violates prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment under the United States Constitution and the Tennessee Constitution. In January, the Tennessee Department of Correction adopted the protocol as an alternative method of execution to the single-drug protocol. In February thirty-three death-sentenced inmates filed a constitutional challenge to the protocol. Nicholas Todd “Nicky” Sutton, 57, of Morristown, charged in a Cocke County case, is one of the appealing inmates. He was convicted of multiple murders, has twice been convicted of capital murder and was scheduled to die in 2015 but the execution was delayed. While the inmates’ case was pending, TDOC eliminated the single-drug lethal injection alternative, leaving the three-drug protocol as the only available lethal injection execution method in Tennessee. In the new opinion, a majority of the Court held that current federal and Tennessee law required the inmates to plead and prove the availability of an alternative method of execution that entails a lesser risk of pain. The Court held that the inmates failed to prove the availability of pentobarbital, so the Court concluded that the inmates failed to establish that the protocol violated their constitutional rights. Justice Sharon G. Lee dissented, concluding that the inmates were denied due process because the proceedings were not fundamentally fair. Including that the inmates had to prove an alternative execution method, even though the three-drug method was shown to cause intolerable pain and the Court’s rush to execute that resulted in the case being placed on an expedited docket.
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