Death penalty tileTHOSE SET FOR EXECUTIONNickolus Johnson: April 22Billy Irick: Oct. 7Edmund Zagorski: Dec. 9Stephen West: Feb. 10, 2015Donnie Johnson: March 24, 2015Olen Hutchison: May 12, 2015Charles Walton Wright: June 23, 2015David Miller: Aug. 18, 2015Abu-Ali Abdur’rahman: Oct. 6, 2015Nicholas Sutton: Nov. 17, 2015Source: Tennessee Supreme CourtABOUT TENNESSEE’S DEATH ROW76 people on death row75 men1 woman3 inmates from Hamilton County: Leroy Hall, Marlon Kiser, Harold NicholsSource: Tennessee Department of CorrectionTENNESSEE EXECUTION RATE1960-2013: Six executions2014-15 (scheduled): 10 executionsSource: Tennessee Department of Correction
Executing prisoners is getting more and more difficult.
State officials who want to enforce the death penalty struggle to find approved lethal injection drugs. Once they find those drugs, prisoners and their lawyers object to how they got them. And, when those state officials survive legal challenge after legal challenge, death penalty opponents object to what those drugs do — not just that they kill, but specifically how they kill.
The general public still approves of the death penalty. But it’s not as popular as it used to be. According to a Gallup poll released last year, 60 percent of Americans support the execution of inmates who have been sentenced to death. That’s down from the peak of 80 percent in 1994 and the lowest level of support in more than 40 years.
And yet, Tennessee officials are preparing to enforce the death penalty more now than they have in decades. On Jan. 31, the Tennessee Supreme Court set execution dates for three inmates, and now the state is scheduled to put 10 death row prisoners to death in the next two years.