Already sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering three people, Nicholas Sutton, 58, was executed in a jail in the southeast state of Tennessee, despite requests for clemency from the daughter of one of the victims, from prison guards and even requests for suspension. of enforcement that lawyers handed over to the Supreme Court.
Nicholas Sutton, 58, was also found guilty of the death of a prisoner in 1985, convicted of child sexual abuse, who stabbed him 38 times.
At that time Sutton, then 18, was serving a life sentence for killing his grandmother and two other people in 1979.
In January, Sutton’s lawyers asked Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee to pardon him, citing expressions of support for Sutton from prison officials.
The request stressed that Sutton had been “decisive several times in protecting guards and fellow prisoners from violence” and even “saved the lives of three guards during a prison riot in 1985”.
In the petition, Sutton’s defenders said they were “model prisoners for over 30 years” and noted that even some of their victims’ relatives are against his execution, including the daughter of the prisoner he killed.
However, Governor Lee declined the request.
Sutton’s lawyers filed a last resort with the US Supreme Court, noting, among other things, that during the trial the man had been handcuffed and that this made him appear guilty before the jury.
But the upper court refused and Sutton died in an electric chair, in prison for the method he chose.
For the last meal, he ordered pork chops with mashed potatoes and peach pie for dessert.
Tennessee suspended executions in 2009 because of a controversy over lethal injections, but reinstated them in 2018.
Sutton was the seventh person executed since then and the fifth to choose the electric chair as a way of dying.
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