The Cruel Heartlessness of Byron Black’s Execution

Byron Black has a heart just like every human being. Black committed a horrific triple murder of a woman and her young daughters so you might say his heart has a defect, which, medically, indisputably, it does, as Black has a defibrillator, one implanted by the State, a legal recognition that Black is, as I asserted from the start, a human being who has a heart.

As has been reported worldwide, Black’s attorneys have raised the nightmarish medical prospect that if Tennessee doesn’t first deactivate the defibrillator it will continuously shock Black’s heart once he is injected with the torturous execution drug known as pentobarbital.  NBC News, for example, reported that Dr. Gail Van Norman, an anesthesiology professor at the University of Washington who specializes in heart surgeries, testified that “the use of a potent amount of pentobarbital, which can cause death from respiratory failure, could unnecessarily trigger Black’s defibrillator” repeatedly delivering “devastating” shocks.

Other reasons advanced to not execute Black include the fact Black ambulates in a wheelchair, suffers from heart failure, advanced dementia, brain damage, and kidney disease. Further, as The Washington Post reported, Black has “petitions pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that because of his severe intellectual disability—Black has an IQ below 70 and fails basic competence tests, according to court filings—he would not be eligible for the death penalty if he were tried today”—a fact the state conceded in 2022.

As I demanded to know when Alabama vengefully executed an 83-year-old man in 2018: “Why? Other than the reactionary, regressive idea of ‘retribution’—whose flawed moral underpinning is interchangeable with bloodthirsty, wild, wild West revenge—how will justice be served? And, for whom? [At the time, I insisted that the] premeditated, state-sponsored senicide of the most senior of senior citizens on Alabama’s death row won’t make anyone—not anyone in Alabama, and not anyone anywhere in the United States or the world—safer.” The same is true about Tennessee and its intent to execute 69-year-old Black despite Black inarguably not posing a safety threat to anyone and his already being severely punished through his imprisonment that should be allowed to continue until Black’s impending natural death.

Because, just as I argued elsewhere about an execution in Oklahoma, “I’m firmly convinced God doesn’t want His people to participate in lethal vengeance no matter the heinous crimes a person like [Black] has committed; a just and merciful God doesn’t embrace state-sanctioned killing, a racist practice inextricably linked to the history of slavery in this country, to kill other human beings whom religious people believe he made in His image.”

When I made that argument in March of last year, I also advanced “we are now living through a nasty, bloodthirsty era where our Supreme Court Justices are quick to greenlight executions—often in the wee hours of the night on execution days—and often without giving any reasons in writing or otherwise for doing so. But though our nation’s death penalty jurisprudence is shameful and contorted in confounding moral contradictions, we don’t need jurists to tell us how to be good people.”

Good, civilized people know that old, frail, sick and close-to-dying prisoners like Byron Black shouldn’t be tortured to death with questionable drugs; Governor Bill Lee could join the ranks of good, civilized Tennesseans who know this and commute Black’s death sentence before it is imposed on August 5. (As reported by The Tennessean, the father of the young girls Black killed said “he’s forgiven Black through God and will still be at peace if the case is commuted to life without parole.”)

Good people whose hearts aren’t poisoned by an obsession with lethal vengeance—a vengeance cloaked in legal veneer, but which, at root, is indistinguishable from the vengeance Black exacted when he committed his depraved murders—these good people know, if it goes forward, Black’s execution will be another example of capital punishment’s heartlessness.