In Case Permeated with Race Bias, Tennessee Plans to Execute Possibly Innocent and Intellectually Disabled Black Man in Murder of White Woman

Pervis Payne (pic­tured) was young, black, and, he says, in the wrong place at the wrong time. The son of a min­is­ter, he is on death row in Tennessee, con­vict­ed of the hor­rif­ic mur­ders of a white woman and her two-year-old daugh­ter and the stab­bing of her three-year-old son in 1987. His case, pro­filed by Steven Hale in The Appeal on April 29, 2020, fea­tures evi­dence of inno­cence, intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, and racial stereo­typ­ing. Payne is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on December 3, 2020. 

Since the day he was arrest­ed for Charisse Christopher’s mur­der, Payne has main­tained his inno­cence and that he hap­pened upon the crime scene acci­den­tal­ly and attempt­ed to help the vic­tim. His tri­al, con­duct­ed in the coun­ty that had the most known lynch­ings in the state of Tennessee and was respon­si­ble for near­ly half of its death sen­tences, was taint­ed by high­ly sex­u­al­ized racial stereo­types. During his inter­ro­ga­tion, he lat­er told his sis­ter, police said to him, ​“you think you black now, wait until we fry you.” Prosecutors with­held key evi­dence from the defense and pre­sent­ed vic­tim-impact evi­dence that flout­ed a U.S. Supreme Court rul­ing that had been issued just months before. The Tennessee state courts excused the con­sti­tu­tion­al vio­la­tion as harm­less and, after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, it over­ruled its pri­or vic­tim-impact deci­sion and per­mit­ted Payne’s death sen­tence to stand.

Then, in 2019, the defense dis­cov­ered new phys­i­cal evi­dence that had been with­held from them for more than 30 years. Payne’s attor­neys also argue that he is not eli­gi­ble for the death penal­ty because he is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled, but the Tennessee courts have so far refused to pro­vide him a hear­ing on that issue.

Hale’s pro­file details a lurid crime scene that trig­gered long-stand­ing racial bias­es. On June 27, 1987, Payne says he was wait­ing out­side his girlfriend’s apart­ment build­ing for her to return home when a man ran past him drop­ping coins and papers. Payne picked up some of the items, then went inside and saw that the door across the hall from his girlfriend’s apart­ment was open. He heard sounds of dis­tress and went inside, where, he says, ​“I saw the worst thing I ever saw in my life.” He tes­ti­fied that he found Christopher with a knife in her throat ​“with her hand on the knife like she had been try­ing to get it out and her mouth was just mov­ing but words had fad­ed away. And I didn’t know what to do.” Christopher was bleed­ing pro­fuse­ly. Payne said he pulled the knife from her throat, cov­er­ing him­self in blood in the process, and went out­side to try to flag down help. 

At tri­al, he tes­ti­fied: ​“As soon as I left out the door I saw a police car, and some oth­er feel­ing just went all over me and just pan­icked, just like, oh, look at this. I’m com­ing out of here with blood on me and every­thing. It going to look like I done this crime.” He was arrest­ed for the mur­der lat­er the same day. In a recent court fil­ing, his attor­neys said, ​“His actions were that of a scared, intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled, twen­ty-year old. There is noth­ing in Mr. Payne’s back­ground before, or since, that is con­sis­tent with the sort of per­son who would com­mit such a crime.”

In a motion filed in December, Payne’s attor­neys wrote that the prosecution’s the­o­ry of the case was ​“con­coct­ed out of whole cloth” and based on ​“out­dat­ed racial stereo­typ­ing.” Payne’s attor­neys char­ac­ter­ized the pros­e­cu­tion case against Payne as that of a sex­u­al­ly preda­to­ry black man, high on drugs, who attacked a white woman. Prosecutors claimed, with­out evi­dence, that Payne had sex­u­al­ly assault­ed Christopher, pre­sent­ing a bloody tam­pon that they said he had pulled from her body. The tam­pon did not appear in any crime scene pho­tos or video. Police pur­port­ed to find evi­dence that linked Payne — who had no his­to­ry of drug use — to drugs but refused his mother’s request that Payne be per­mit­ted to take a drug test. 

Prosecutors also failed to dis­close that a bloody com­forter, sheets, and pil­low were found in the apart­ment and nev­er test­ed. The bed­ding had nev­er been includ­ed in any list of evi­dence in the case and its exis­tence was not known to the defense until 2019, when assis­tant fed­er­al defend­er Kelley Henry obtained a court order to review the evi­dence. The pros­e­cu­tion had always main­tained that the crime scene was lim­it­ed to Christopher’s kitchen, so the pres­ence of blood on the sheets, Henry said, ​“is com­plete­ly incon­sis­tent with any the­o­ry of the case that has ever been presented.”

Payne’s case is anoth­er in a series of cas­es in which police or pros­e­cu­tors in south­ern states have played on sex­u­al­ized racial prej­u­dices to send black men to death row. 

In Alabama, police and pros­e­cu­tors framed Walter McMillian for cap­i­tal mur­der, part­ly in ret­ri­bu­tion for his hav­ing an affair with a white woman. He was sen­tenced to death in a tri­al that last­ed a day-and-a-half and in which the tri­al judge over­rode the jury’s rec­om­men­da­tion for a life sen­tence. In Texas, pros­e­cu­tors argued to an all-white jury that Rodney Reed had mur­dered a white woman with whom he was hav­ing an affair. They then tried to block the Innocence Project’s request for DNA test­ing of phys­i­cal evi­dence and opposed giv­ing Reed a hear­ing on evi­dence that the victim’s fiancé —an ex-police offi­cer with a his­to­ry of sex­u­al vio­lence — com­mit­ted the mur­der and framed Reed. In South Carolina, pros­e­cu­tor Donald Myers told an all-white jury that defen­dant Johnny Bennett was ​“King Kong on a bad day,” a ​“mon­ster,” a ​“beast of bur­den,” and a ​“cave­man,” and elicit­ed irrel­e­vant tes­ti­mo­ny that Bennett had an inter­ra­cial sex­u­al rela­tion­ship with a ​“blonde-head­ed” prison guard.