Lawyers challenge execution of Tennessee man with intellectual disability, dementia and severe brain damage

Attorneys for a 68-year-old death row inmate set to be executed Aug. 5 are asking the Tennessee Supreme Court to reverse a lower court’s decision that declined to decide whether he is ineligible for capital punishment, reported The Tennessean. 

Byron Black has been on death row since 1989 for the Nashville murders of his ex-girlfriend Angela Clay, 29, and her two daughters, Latoya, 9, and Lakesha, 6. 

His lawyers argue that Black’s intellectual disability, along with dementia and severe brain damage, make him incompetent for execution. 

“Byron simply does not have the intellectual capacity to grasp why the State seeks to kill him, so his execution serves no legitimate penological purpose, it’s just cruel,” said his lawyer Kelley Henry, a supervisory assistant federal public defender. “Byron is an elderly man in failing health. His execution would be a grotesque and pointless exercise of state power.” 

Black, one of the longest serving death row inmates, is the second man scheduled to be executed this year after Tennessee in December announced that it would resume capital punishment following a five-year hiatus.

The state on May 22 executed Oscar Smith for the 1989 killings of his estranged wife and her two teenage sons.

Black’s lawyers have long argued that his intellectual disabilities should keep him off death row.

Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk has declared Black intellectually disabled and said his death sentence should be commuted. 

A trial court, however, ruled that it did not have the jurisdiction to decide Black’s incompetency claim. The Tennessee Court of Appeals later denied Black’s request for a hearing on his intellectual disability claim.

According to court documents, experts have said Black is “profoundly disabled" with memory, cognition and daily functioning in the bottom 5% of people his age.

His lawyers said Black has been diagnosed with brain damage, possibly from factors including “fetal exposure to alcohol, lead exposure during childhood, and several serious head injuries.”

Black is also frail and suffers from congestive heart failure and stage 4 kidney disease, his lawyers said.

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