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Tennessee Executes Nicholas Sutton in the Electric Chair for a 1985 Prison Killing

Already serving life for killing his grandmother, Sutton stabbed fellow inmate Carl Estep 38 times. Thirty-five years later, the governor refused clemency and he died at Riverbend.

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Illustration: a floodlit prison fence topped with razor wire, seen through bare trees on a rainy winter night

Tennessee put Nicholas Sutton to death in the electric chair on Thursday, February 20, 2020. He was pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m. at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the Tennessee Department of Correction said. He was 58, and he had chosen electrocution over the state's preferred method of lethal injection, the fifth Tennessee prisoner in about 16 months to make that choice.

The crime that sent him there happened inside a prison. On the morning of January 15, 1985, at the Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility, fellow inmate Carl Estep was found on the lower bunk of his cell, stabbed 38 times in the chest and neck. According to the Tennessee Supreme Court's account of the trial evidence, the killing happened in the few minutes each morning when no officer was posted in Estep's unit during a shift change. Other inmates testified that Estep had threatened to kill Sutton after a dispute over a marijuana deal. One witness who looked through the narrow window in the cell door said he saw Sutton stabbing Estep as he screamed.

Sutton was already serving life when he walked into that cell. As a young man he had been convicted of first-degree murder in Tennessee for killing his grandmother, Dorothy Sutton, who had raised him as his adoptive mother. In 1981, CNN reported, he also pleaded guilty in North Carolina to second-degree murder in the deaths of John M. Large, 19, and Charles P. Almon, 46, and received two more life sentences.

A jury convicted him of Estep's murder and sentenced him to death, finding that he had a prior violent felony conviction, that he killed while in lawful confinement, and that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel. Two co-defendants were tried with him. One was convicted and sentenced to life; the other was acquitted. On October 24, 1988, the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the death sentence.

His last weeks were spent fighting for clemency. In a petition to Gov. Bill Lee, his lawyer, Kevin Sharp, gathered statements from corrections workers who said Sutton had saved them. Tony Eden, a retired corrections official, said Sutton and another inmate pulled him away from five armed prisoners trying to take him hostage during a 1985 riot. A former prison manager said that when she fell in 1994, Sutton helped her up, handed back her keys and radio, and called for staff. Some relatives of his victims asked the governor to spare him. Charles Maynard, a Methodist minister and Charles Almon's nephew, wrote to Lee asking for clemency.

Others in those families did not. Amy Large Cook was 11 when her brother John disappeared. "He suffered a terrible and horrific death and for that I will never forgive Mr. Sutton," she told reporters.

Lee declined to intervene on Wednesday, February 19. On Thursday the U.S. Supreme Court denied the last requests to halt the execution without explanation. Strapped into the chair, Sutton thanked his wife, his family and his friends. "I hope I do a much better job in the next life than I did in this one," he said, according to CNN.

He was the first person Tennessee had executed for killing another inmate since it resumed executions in August 2018, CNN reported, and the seventh man put to death in that time.

Published accounts differ on when Sutton was sentenced to death and on his age at the time of his first conviction, so neither is given here. The two North Carolina deaths ended in guilty pleas to second-degree murder, as reported by CNN; the details of those cases come from press reports, not from a court record we have read.

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