A triple murderer, convicted of also murdering a fellow prisoner, was executed Thursday evening in the state of Tennessee, after the rejection by the United States Supreme Court of a last resort by his lawyers. Nicholas Sutton was convicted of participating in the murder of Carl Estep, a prisoner convicted of sexually assaulting a minor, who was found stabbed 38 times in 1985. At the time of the homicide, Nicholas Sutton was serving a sentence life imprisonment for having killed, in 1979, the grandmother who had raised him. He then led the police to the bodies of two other men whom he admitted to having killed.
Nicholas Sutton was executed by electrocution in Nashville and pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m. local, local authorities said in a statement. His supporters had presented in January to the Republican governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, a request for leniency, supported by members of the prison administration. This request pointed out that Sutton had intervened on several occasions to protect prison employees as well as fellow inmates, in particular by "saving" a guard during a riot in 1985.
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In the same plea, his advocates argued for the model behavior of the death row inmate for three decades and the fact that certain family members of his victims opposed his execution, including the daughter of Carl Estep. The Tennessee governor, however, rejected the request on Wednesday. Nicholas Sutton's lawyers therefore launched final appeals to the United States Supreme Court, citing, among other things, the fact that their client was handcuffed during his trial, which in their view accentuated his apparent guilt before the jury.
This conservative South American state suspended executions in 2009 in response to a lethal injection controversy, but reinstated them in 2018. Nicholas Sutton is the seventh man to be executed since, and the fifth to choose the electric chair. It is the fourth execution in the United States this year.