Murder Victims’ Family Members Ask Tennessee Governor Lee to Halt Scheduled Executions

On May 8, 2025, a group of fam­i­ly mem­bers who have lost loved ones to vio­lence in Tennessee deliv­ered a let­ter to Governor Bill Lee’s office request­ing that he halt the state’s upcom­ing sched­uled exe­cu­tions. In their let­ter, the group of 51 ​“vic­tims, sur­vivors, and fam­i­ly mem­bers of those impact­ed by vio­lent crime” argue the death penal­ty does not act as a heal­ing tool for vic­tims and takes away from state-fund­ed resources that could help with their heal­ing. For these indi­vid­u­als, ​“access to trau­ma recov­ery ser­vices, finan­cial and funer­al assis­tance, coun­sel­ing, safe hous­ing, and vio­lence pre­ven­tion pro­grams” are tru­ly help­ful, yet ​“these essen­tial resources remain out of reach for many.”

During a May 8, 2025, press con­fer­ence, Tim Williams, founder of the Memphis Chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, shared data relat­ed to Tennessee mur­der cas­es and not­ed that about half of all mur­ders in the state remain unsolved. ​“Tennessee spends mil­lions of dol­lars to pur­sue exe­cu­tions for a hand­ful of peo­ple who have already been incar­cer­at­ed for decades, while hun­dreds of Tennessee fam­i­lies con­tin­ue to wait for their loved ones’ cas­es to be solved,” said Mr. Williams. Rafiah Muhammad-McCormick, whose son was mur­dered in 2020, spoke on behalf of oth­er fam­i­lies through her own expe­ri­ence as a griev­ing moth­er. ​“These fam­i­lies are not sit­ting around think­ing about exe­cu­tions. They are try­ing to fig­ure out how to sur­vive,” said Ms. Muhammad-McCormick, direc­tor of com­mu­ni­ty out­reach for Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Ms. Muhammad-McCormick also not­ed that the state has spent $600,000 in recent years on exe­cu­tion drugs and sug­gest­ed that the mon­ey would be bet­ter spent on ser­vices to help vic­tims’ fam­i­ly mem­bers. The let­ter to Gov. Lee says the state’s use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment ​“drains resources from pro­grams that could pro­vide real and imme­di­ate relief to all vic­tims and their fam­i­lies.” The fam­i­ly mem­bers ask Gov. Lee to ​“not allow exe­cu­tions to resume giv­en all of these con­cerns and instead ensure that Tennessee’s resources are used in ways that uplift vic­tims, strength­en com­mu­ni­ties, and pre­vent future violence.”

In March 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court sched­uled exe­cu­tion dates for four indi­vid­u­als: Oscar Smith (May 22), Bryon Black (August 5), Donald Middlebrooks (September 24), and Harold Nichols (December 11). On April 1, the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee issued a stay of exe­cu­tion for Mr. Middlebrooks because of pend­ing lit­i­ga­tion. The exe­cu­tion dates were sched­uled after the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) announced in December 2024 that per­son­nel had com­plet­ed a mul­ti-year lethal injec­tion pro­to­col review and deter­mined that instead of the pre­vi­ous three-drug com­bi­na­tion, lethal injec­tion exe­cu­tions going for­ward will use a sin­gle bar­bi­tu­rate, pentobarbital. 

After the state supreme court set exe­cu­tion dates, a group of nine death row pris­on­ers filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing the state’s sole use of pen­to­bar­bi­tal in its revised lethal injec­tion pro­to­col, argu­ing it cre­ates a ​“high risk of a tor­tur­ous death.” Both Mr. Smith and Mr. Black are par­ties to the law­suit, which alleges pen­to­bar­bi­tal is ​“a poi­son that has been shown through recent evi­dence to pose a high risk of a tor­tur­ous death, par­tic­u­lar­ly if obtained, stored, han­dled, and/​or administered incorrectly.” 

In May 2022, Gov. Lee paused all exe­cu­tions and called for an ​“inde­pen­dent review” of the state’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col to address issues that led him to halt Oscar Smith’s exe­cu­tion less than a half-hour before it was sched­uled to be car­ried out on April 21, 2022. Gov. Lee retained for­mer U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to con­duct that review of the pro­to­col, and found that between 2018 and 2022, TDOC repeat­ed­ly vio­lat­ed its own require­ment to test the exe­cu­tion drugs for poten­cy, steril­i­ty, and endo­tox­in con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. In response to Mr. Stanton’s report, Gov. Lee announced four spe­cif­ic actions his admin­is­tra­tion would imple­ment: lead­er­ship restruc­tur­ing with­in TDOC, appoint­ment of a per­ma­nent TDOC com­mis­sion­er, pro­to­col revi­sion, and com­pre­hen­sive train­ing review relat­ed to updat­ed pro­to­cols and operational modifications.

Tennessee’s last exe­cu­tion was car­ried out in February 2020, with the elec­tro­cu­tion of Nicholas Sutton.