The Tennessee Supreme Court and Governor said they would not intervene in the execution of death row inmate, Billy Ray Irick.
The execution is set for Thursday. If it happens, it will be the first execution to take place in Tennessee since 2009.
The last execution in Tennessee was held on December 2, 2009. In that case, 53-year-old Cecil Johnson was executed by lethal injection. He was the sixth person executed in the state since 2000 and had spent 28 years on death row.
Billy Ray Irick was sentenced to death following his 1986 convictions for the rape and murder of a seven-year-old child.
Following Irick’s exhaustion of all levels of appellate review, the Tennessee Supreme Court set his execution date for December 7, 2010. He however, was granted a stay based upon his claim that he was mentally incompetent to be executed.
The Court rescheduled his execution for October 7, 2014, after affirming a trial court’s determination that he was mentally competent to be executed.
In 2015, Irick’s execution again was stayed following the filing by Irick and other death row inmates of a lawsuit claiming that the Tennessee Department of Correction’s (“TDOC”) single-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital was unconstitutional.
On March 28, 2017, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the single-drug protocol as constitutional. In January 2018, after the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case involving the one-drug protocol, the Tennessee Supreme Court again rescheduled Irick’s execution, this time for August 9, 2018.
The chancery court in Davidson County dismissed the inmates’ complaint that they filed on July 26, 2018, and the plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal on July 30, 2018. Also on July 30, 2018, Irick filed a motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court to vacate the Court’s order setting his August 9, 2018 execution date.
On Monday, a majority of the Court denied the motion to Vacate Execution Date. The Court pointed out a 2015 amendment to the Rules of the Tennessee Supreme Court governing death penalty matters that requires a death row inmate to “prove a likelihood of success on the merits” of collateral litigation to be granted a stay of an execution date while that collateral litigation is pending. This is the first death penalty case in which the Court has applied this revised rule.
Irick's next options would be to file a motion in federal court or have a stay issued by Governor Bill Haslam. Yet, his attorney said he did "not at the moment" plan on to appeal to U.S. Supreme Court. And, Haslam issued the following statement Monday night, saying he would not be doing that:
“After careful consideration, I am declining to intervene in the case of Billy Ray Irick, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1986 by a Knox County jury for the murder and aggravated rape of 7-year-old Paula Dyer. Irick requests clemency based upon his mental health status at the time the crime was committed. However, Irick was examined by a mental health expert and ruled competent to stand trial. The jury heard evidence regarding Irick’s mental health during sentencing, and state and federal courts, including the Tennessee Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the United States, have reviewed and upheld the jury’s verdict and sentence on 17 different occasions, 11 of which occurred after additional evidence emerged years after the trial regarding his behavior in the weeks leading up to the offense. Both state and federal courts have ruled that the additional evidence does not undermine the jury’s verdict or warrant a new trial.
“I took an oath to uphold the law. Capital punishment is the law in Tennessee and was ordered in this case by a jury of Tennesseans and upheld by more than a dozen state and federal courts. My role is not to be the 13th juror or the judge or to impose my personal views, but to carefully review the judicial process to make sure it was full and fair. Because of the extremely thorough judicial review of all of the evidence and arguments at every stage in this case, clemency is not appropriate.”
