The Tennessee Supreme Court has set execution dates for six men on the state’s death row, scheduling their executions for between May 16, 2019 and April 9, 2020. This mass execution schedule, issued on November 16, 2018, comes in the wake of the controversial executions of Billy Ray Irick and Edmund Zagorski earlier this year and as the state prepares to execute David Earl Miller on December 6. If all seven scheduled executions take place, Tennessee will have conducted more executions in a two-year period than it had in the rest of the 45-year modern era of the death penalty.

Prior to Irick’s August 9, 2018 execution, Tennessee had carried out only six executions since bringing back the death penalty in February 1974, all of them between 2000 and 2009. Tennessee’s execution method and the state supreme court’s handling of lethal-injection litigation has come under criticism, as a newly constituted conservative court majority permitted prison officials to refuse to provide evidence of their claimed efforts to obtain an alternative execution drug, expedited its consideration of death-row state prisoners’ challenge to the state three-drug lethal-injection protocol to facilitate Zagorski’s execution, and refused to consider medical evidence concerning Irick’s reportedly torturous execution.

Irick was executed over scathing dissents from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who called it “barbarism,” and Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Sharon Lee, who criticized the state’s “rush to execute” and said that the state’s evasion of questions concerning the availability of pentobarbital as an alternative to execution with the state’s three-drug formula had rendered the trial court proceedings in the case “meaningless.” Lee later blasted the “rocket docket” created by the court’s removal of the prisoners’ lethal-injection challenge from an intermediate appeals court so the high court could decide the case before Zagorski’s scheduled execution. “Given the gravity of the issues presented in this appeal, the voluminous record to be reviewed, and the legal analysis to be made, the [court’s] super-expedited schedule is wholly inadequate,” she wrote.

Autopsy reports from Irick’s execution became available after the court established its expedited schedule. Edmund Zagorski’s defense lawyers then provided the court with an affidavit from a prominent medical expert who concluded that Irick had not been properly anesthetized, leaving him “aware and sensate during his execution.” Irick “would have experienced the feeling of choking, drowning in his own fluids, suffocating, being buried alive, and the burning sensation caused by the injection of the potassium chloride,” the doctor wrote. After hearing argument, the court refused to consider that medical evidence and upheld the execution protocol. Zagorski then opted to be executed by electrocution. His attorney said of the decision, “[Tennessee] has coerced Mr. Zagorski — with the threat of extreme chemical torture via a barbaric three-drug lethal injection protocol — to choose to die a painful and gruesome death in the electric chair.” The day before the new execution dates were announced, a federal judge denied a stay request from David Earl Miller, who had sought execution by firing squad as an alternative to the three-drug lethal injection.

(Anita Wadhwani, Tennessee Supreme Court sets 6 execution dates in next two years, The Tennessean, November 16, 2018; David Boucher, Tennessee Supreme Court justice rips ‘rocket docket’ in lethal injection appeal, The Tennessean, August 14, 2018; Jamie Satterfield, First conservative TN Supreme Court in decades changed rule, paving way for Irick execution, Knoxville News Sentinel, August 9, 2018; Robin Konrad, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States, Death Penalty Information Center, November 20, 2018.) See Tennessee, Lethal Injection, and Upcoming Executions.

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