Witnesses have described the execution of Byron Black, a 69-year-old disabled man on death row in Tennessee, as a deeply distressing event, with the inmate reportedly crying out in pain before death. The execution, carried out on Tuesday at Riverbend maximum security prison in Nashville, has been labelled ‘100% botched’ by Black’s lawyer, Kelley Henry.
According to Henry and several journalists who witnessed the lethal injection, staff struggled for around ten minutes to find a vein in Black’s second arm after blood oozed from the first IV site. As the drug pentobarbital was administered, Black began breathing loudly, groaned and said ‘It hurts so bad’ and ‘I can’t do this’, repeatedly lifting his head. His spiritual adviser tried to comfort him, singing ‘The Lord is my shepherd’. Black was pronounced dead at 10.43am, roughly ten minutes after he cried out.
Henry, who represented Black for 25 years, said: ‘Something went horribly, horribly wrong … For him to lift his head up several times and say it hurts, I really wasn’t prepared. I could not believe it was happening. It was horrific.’ She described the execution as ‘torture’. Despite this, Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, defended it as ‘entirely legal’, noting that Black had filed a dozen unsuccessful legal challenges.
Black was a wheelchair user with lifelong intellectual disabilities, dementia, brain damage, kidney failure, severe heart failure and prostate cancer. He spent 35 years on death row for the 1988 murders of his girlfriend and her two young daughters, though he maintained his innocence. The Tennessee governor, Bill Lee, declined clemency, and the state’s department of correction declined to comment.
The incident adds to a series of troubled executions in the US, including a halted Idaho execution in 2024 after failed IV attempts, an Alabama killing using nitrogen gas that caused violent shaking, and a 2021 Oklahoma execution involving vomiting and convulsions. A Guardian report in May also suggested a South Carolina firing squad execution was botched.
