On the evening of February 20, 2020, the State of Tennessee strapped Nicholas Todd Sutton into its electric chair at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He was 58. He had been in prison since he was 18, convicted of killing four people: his grandmother, two men he knew in 1979, and a fellow prisoner in 1985. It was the last of those killings, the stabbing of an inmate named Carl Estep, that put him in the chair.
His case drew attention for a reason that has little parallel in American capital cases. In his last weeks the people asking the governor to spare him included seven current and former corrections officials, five of the jurors who had sentenced him to death, and members of three of his four victims' families. A retired correction lieutenant said he owed Sutton his life. The sister of another victim, John Large, said she wanted the execution carried out. The governor declined to intervene.
Sutton grew up in Morristown, in Hamblen County, East Tennessee. What is known of his early life comes mainly from the evidence his lawyers gathered after his trial, summarized by the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals and quoted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 2011, and from his 2020 clemency petition.
His mother left before he was a year old; the Cox Media Group account of the petition names her as Edna Fay O'Neill. His father, Pete Sutton, was seriously mentally ill and, according to the post-conviction evidence, was hospitalized for long periods in a psychiatric hospital between 1969 and 1976. A clinical psychologist, Dr. Gillian Blair, described a home that was "unstable, often violent and threatening," with little supervision or structure. In 1973, she said, there was a restraining order against the father after he held the boy and his mother at gunpoint during a standoff with police. The clemency petition, as reported by the Death Penalty Information Center, put it slightly differently: that Pete Sutton took his son and the boy's grandmother hostage at gunpoint. The petition also said the father once broke the boy's arm, and that he encouraged him to use drugs; by about 12, his lawyers said, Nick was regularly using drugs with his father.
He was separated from his maternal grandparents at about two and lost his paternal grandfather at seven or eight. He was raised by his paternal grandmother, Dorothy Sutton, a schoolteacher, who adopted him. The Sixth Circuit majority wrote in 2011 that she was the "one constant and positive influence" in his life and that she "raised him and adequately provided for him."
He was shot in the eye at nine, had several head injuries as a boy, including one in a motorcycle accident at 12, and was shot in the knee at 16. By his teens he was using a wide range of drugs and, by his own admission, dealing them to pay for his habit. Because of his juvenile problems and drug use he was sent to Knoxville to live with an aunt and attend high school there. He dropped out in the eleventh grade and earned a GED at a community college in 1978. At 17 he joined the Navy, in November 1978, and was out with an honorable discharge the next month; the records described him as overwhelmed by training and unable to cope with the emotional pressure. His father died in 1977 of hypothermia and exposure, with alcohol listed as a contributing factor, according to the post-conviction record. WBIR in Knoxville reported in 2020 that the father died by suicide in 1976. The court record is followed here and the conflict is flagged in the notes.
By 1979, WBIR reported, Sutton was an 18-year-old dropout with an expensive drug habit, living with his grandmother. A friend's sister remembered that he drove an ice cream truck. He also worked planting trees for a Knoxville contractor named Charles Almon.
John Large was 19 and lived in Knoxville. The Tennessean described him as Sutton's high school friend. His younger sister, Amy Large Cook, was 11 when he disappeared. Forty years later she described him to WBIR as "a fun, caring, loving, hard-working young man," and wrote to Tennessee's governor that he "was denied the opportunity to live a full life with a family of his own."
According to WBIR, Large was last seen with Sutton, who picked him up in Knoxville for a drug deal. Sutton later told people the deal had gone bad and that Large had left with the money. Large was killed on a trip to Mount Sterling, North Carolina, and buried in a shallow grave on land belonging to Sutton's family; the Tennessean said the land was his aunt's. The timing is uncertain in the published accounts. One WBIR report put Large's disappearance around September 1979; another said he was apparently killed in August. His body was not found until Sutton, after his arrest for his grandmother's death, led investigators to the grave.
Charles P. Almon III was 46. He was an engineer in Knoxville who owned a land reclamation business; Sutton worked for him as a tree planter. His nephew, the Rev. Charles Maynard, described him to WBIR as a lover of history, an athlete, a musician and an engineer. Almon's parents lived on Signal Mountain, and he called them every Sunday. In September 1979 the calls stopped.
His Jaguar was found near Newport, in Cocke County, with his valuables still inside it. He was not. According to the Tennessean, Sutton shot him in October 1979; WBIR's reporting put his disappearance in September. The search for him went on for months, and the Tennessean reported that searchers spent thousands of dollars looking in places Sutton pointed to as his story changed.
He was found by chance. In May 1980 divers searching a rock quarry at Newport for evidence in an unrelated case came upon his body, wrapped and chained to a concrete block. "They were diving in a rock quarry in Newport looking for evidence in another case and found my uncle," Maynard told WBIR. Maynard, then a young minister, officiated at his uncle's funeral. The autopsy showed that Almon had died months before Dorothy Sutton, which contradicted the account Sutton had given in the meantime. The Tennessean placed the quarry in North Carolina; WBIR and the Cox Media Group report placed it at Newport in Cocke County, Tennessee. The latter is followed here.
Dorothy Sutton was 58, a retired elementary school teacher who was respected in Morristown. Amy Large Cook, who knew the family, called her "a very giving and loving person." She had taken in her son's child and adopted him.
In the days before Christmas 1979 she disappeared. Sutton told relatives she had left on December 22 with a man he did not know, and on Christmas Day he reported her missing. Relatives suspected him. WBIR reported that Morristown detectives found signs of foul play at the house and arrested him. Cook told WBIR that her own father had asked Dorothy Sutton to check with Nicky about where John Large was, and that he later felt guilt over her death. The Tennessee courts, in the state's later description, said Sutton beat his grandmother to death "after she found out that he had murdered two other people."
Her body was recovered from the Nolichucky River in Hamblen County; the Morristown Citizen Tribune reported the recovery on December 30, 1979, and the Associated Press account carried by Cox Media said it was found four days after Christmas. According to the Tennessean, Sutton had struck her unconscious with a piece of firewood, wrapped her in a blanket and trash bags and chained her to a cinder block; WBIR said it was a concrete block of about 20 pounds and that she was put into the river from the Hale Bridge. She was still alive when she went into the water. The autopsy found that she drowned.
Investigators later spoke of a "Sutton signature," according to the Tennessean: bodies wrapped, chained and weighted with blocks.
Sutton was tried in Hamblen County for his grandmother's death. WBIR reported that the trial took place in April, without giving the year. Before it, he confessed to killing Charles Almon but told a different story: that Almon had killed his grandmother and that he had killed Almon in self-defense. Investigators did not believe it, and neither did the jury. The autopsy finding that Almon had been dead for months before Dorothy Sutton disappeared undercut the account. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The Tennessee Supreme Court later described the conviction as felony first-degree murder of his grandmother, "who was his adoptive mother."
After the verdict, according to WBIR, he confessed to other killings, among them John Large's. He also claimed two more killings that turned out to be invented, giving names of victims who did not exist. Those claims got him several days out of his cell on searches for graves, including a search in May 1980. Amy Large Cook said he "loved the attention."
In 1981, according to the Asheville Citizen as cited by CNN, he pleaded guilty in North Carolina to second-degree murder in the deaths of John Large and Charles Almon and received two more life sentences. Neither report gave the North Carolina county or the date of the pleas. He was now serving three life terms. He was still 19 or 20.
Sutton served his sentences in Tennessee prisons that were, by most accounts of the period, overcrowded and violent. From 1980 to 1993 a federal lawsuit, Grubbs v. Bradley, examined conditions across the system. He was held at Brushy Mountain State Prison and then at the Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility, a prison of one-story housing units called guilds. Dr. Blair testified that the "threatening environment" he had lived in as a child was present in the prison system, which "offered little structure or predictability," where many inmates had weapons and assaults were frequent.
Even before he reached prison there was an episode that his supporters would cite decades later. In 1979, in the Hamblen County jail, a sheriff's deputy named Howard Ferrell was breaking up a fight when another inmate moved to hit him from behind. According to Ferrell's later statement, Sutton tackled the man. "[Nick] probably could have saved my life," Ferrell said.
Carl Isaac Estep, from Knoxville, was serving a sentence for child molestation at Morgan County. He lived in Guild 5. Sutton and two other inmates, Thomas Street and Charles Freeman, lived next door in Guild 6. According to testimony at trial, Estep sold marijuana inside the prison, had sold Sutton and the others what one witness called "bad merchandise," and refused to give back their money. They took his watch and some other belongings, and Estep threatened to kill Sutton. On Sunday, January 13, 1985, an inmate saw a "physical discussion" between them in which Sutton held a knife to Estep's throat.
Estep's eldest daughter, Rosemary Estep Hall, described her father in 2020 as violent and unpredictable. She told the Associated Press that he had set the family's house on fire and deliberately caused a traffic accident that killed her baby sister, and that he was in prison for raping her stepsister. Those accounts are hers, and no court is reported to have tested them.
Each morning at Morgan County there was a gap of five to ten minutes, between about 9:30 and 10:00, when no officer was posted in Guild 5 because of a change of duty. On Tuesday, January 15, 1985, during that gap, Sutton and Street walked into Guild 5 and went to Estep's cell. One witness, Harold Meadows, saw them go in, saw Estep's cellmate come straight out, heard the volume of a television or radio go up, and then heard a scream. Another, Estel Green, whose cell was next door, heard Estep cry, "Don't do that; please don't do that," and then, louder, "Somebody help me; somebody please help me." A third, Cary Scoggins, testified that he looked through the narrow window in the cell door and saw all three men standing at the bunk, saw Sutton and Freeman pull knives, and saw Sutton stab Estep "about sixteen times." The three men, he said, washed their hands in the sink.
Officers found Estep on his lower bunk during a routine shakedown shortly after 10 a.m. He had been stabbed 38 times in the chest and neck. Nine wounds could have been fatal, including one to the carotid artery that, the pathologist said, would have killed him within minutes. He had defensive wounds on his hands and right arm. Two homemade knives lay on the bunk, and a third was hidden under a lamp. Outside Guild 8, officers found a garbage bag of prison clothing; on a jacket sleeve, a knife and a work shirt, a state serologist found blood of Estep's type, and an FBI analyst found a hair consistent with his on a pair of jeans. Another inmate later told the warden's assistant, James Worthington, that he had seen Sutton and Street come back to Guild 6, change clothes and put them in the laundry, and that Sutton bragged of stabbing Estep "twenty-some times."
Sutton, Street and Freeman were tried together in Morgan County Criminal Court in 1986. Security was heavy. Ten uniformed officers were in the courtroom, seven of them armed, with more in plain clothes in the gallery and outside. Sutton later claimed he had sat before the jury in shackles and handcuffs. When the prosecutor laid the homemade knives on the defense table for counsel to inspect, within reach of the three defendants, Sutton's lawyer jerked away and the guards reached for their weapons. Testimony later conflicted over whether any guns were actually drawn.
The defense case was that Estep had threatened Sutton's life and that, in the prison as it then was, striking first was the only defense. An inmate, Carl Crafton, testified as an expert on prison life that once an inmate's life was threatened, "his only defense[] is to make the offensive move." The prosecutor attacked Crafton's testimony as a vision of prisons where inmates made their own rules. The state courts later found that some of the prosecutor's remarks, including a suggestion that the defendants must be guilty because the prison had locked them up first, were improper, but not enough to change the result. Tennessee law did not recognize a pre-emptive killing as self-defense.
The jury convicted Sutton and Street of first-degree murder and acquitted Freeman. Street was sentenced to life. At Sutton's penalty hearing his lawyers called Crafton again and a family named Burchett, who had known him since high school and visited him in prison, to show that he could keep ordinary relationships. They did not present evidence about his childhood. The prosecutor argued that a man already serving life for murder could only be stopped by death: "Will that prevent there being another Carl Estep?"
The jury found three aggravating circumstances: a prior conviction for a violent felony, the first-degree murder of his grandmother; a killing committed in a place of lawful confinement; and a killing that met Tennessee's statutory test of being especially cruel, involving torture or depravity of mind. It found no mitigating circumstances strong enough to outweigh them and sentenced him to death. CBS News reported that he was moved to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville shortly after the trial.
Years later his lawyers said that before trial prosecutors had offered a life sentence. The accounts of why no deal was made do not agree. The Equal Justice Initiative, an advocacy group, said the offer depended on guilty pleas from both Sutton and a co-defendant and that the co-defendant refused. The Cox Media account said Sutton refused a deal on Freeman's behalf. The Court of Criminal Appeals recorded only that a life sentence had been offered during plea talks and held the claim waived.
In 1985, the year Sutton was tried, rioting broke out at Tennessee State Prison in Nashville. Tony Eden, then a correction officer, was cornered by inmates while buildings burned. In an affidavit for the 2020 clemency petition, Eden said five armed prisoners attacked him and tried to take him hostage, and that Sutton and another inmate "confronted them, physically removed me from the situation" and took him to a gate into another building. "I owe my life to Nick Sutton," he wrote. James E. Aiken, a former corrections commissioner and warden who reviewed the record for the petition, wrote that Sutton "saved the lives of these three (prison staff members)." The Sixth Circuit in 2011 noted the riot more briefly: the one positive thing in his mitigation case, it said, was "primarily that he once saved a guard during a prison fight."
On October 24, 1988, the Tennessee Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Frank Drowota, affirmed the conviction and the death sentence. It held that the inmate testimony, "sometimes contradictory and evasive," was enough, that the uncounseled arraignment was harmless, and that the knife incident at the defense table was not reversible. It found the sentence proportionate, saying Sutton "showed a total disregard for human life in the fierceness of the attack." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1990.
Sutton filed for post-conviction relief on December 14, 1990, arguing among other things that his trial lawyers had failed to investigate his background or his mental health. Dr. Blair's evaluation was presented then. She found no psychosis or cognitive impairment, diagnosed a personality disorder and agreed with an earlier diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, and noted that prison records showed that in a safe, structured setting he was well adjusted, caused no management problems and was not violent. The trial court denied relief, and the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed on June 25, 1999.
His federal habeas corpus petition was denied in the Eastern District of Tennessee by Judge Thomas G. Hull. On June 8, 2011, the Sixth Circuit affirmed, two to one. Judge Danny Boggs, for the majority, held that the state courts had reasonably found no prejudice: even with the background evidence, "the net mitigating value of all of this evidence is too low, and the aggravating circumstances are too strong." The court reasoned that it might also have opened the door to evidence of how his grandmother died. Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey concurred. Judge Boyce F. Martin Jr. dissented. Sutton's trial lawyer, he wrote, had not presented the childhood evidence because he "simply did not deign to ask his client," and a thorough inquiry into a client's background was as basic in a capital case as "show up," "wear a suit," and "stay awake." Had one juror heard the story, Martin wrote, Sutton would not have been sentenced to death. The Supreme Court denied review in 2012.
An execution date set for 2015 was blocked by further litigation, the Tennessean reported. On June 8, 2016, Sutton moved to reopen his post-conviction case, arguing that a 2015 Supreme Court ruling striking down a vague federal sentencing clause also invalidated Tennessee's prior-violent-felony aggravator. He added claims about the shackles, jury selection, his mental health, the knives, prison conditions and the plea offer, and the fact that the assistant district attorney handling the case had, in private practice decades earlier, represented Carl Estep in the child molestation prosecution that sent him to Morgan County. The trial court denied relief, and on January 31, 2020, three weeks before the execution date, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed, finding the claims either waived or already decided.
By the account of those who knew him in prison, Sutton changed. CBS News reported that prison records showed no serious disciplinary actions after 1990. In 1994, at Riverbend, Cheryl Donaldson, then a unit manager, fell and struck her head on a concrete floor, and lay dazed with her keys and radio in the corridor. She feared another prisoner would attack her. Sutton, she wrote, "sprang into action, helped me to my feet, retrieved my keys and radio, and alerted staff to come to my assistance."
That same year he married Reba, a woman he had met through a pen-pal program, in the death row visitation gallery. He asked Tony Eden to be his best man. "All he wanted was just for me to stand there," Eden told CBS News; he said it was the only favor Sutton ever asked of him.
His lawyers and supporters described other acts. Joyce House, the mother of Paul House, a death row prisoner who developed multiple sclerosis and was freed in 2009 after his conviction was overturned, said Sutton bathed her son and carried him to visits when he was denied a wheelchair. "Nick is the only reason Paul is alive today," she wrote. The Equal Justice Initiative reported that he guided Lee Hall Jr., who went blind on death row, through the unit, and that he helped a man who collapsed in his cell. He studied mediation and took part, as a leader, in a class that brought Vanderbilt divinity students together with men on death row. A forensic neuropsychologist, Dr. Barry Crown, concluded for the clemency petition that trauma and drug use had impaired the development of his reasoning and judgment, and noted that he had committed no violence after his brain reached maturity.
On January 14, 2020, Sutton's lawyers, led by Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, asked Gov. Bill Lee to commute the sentence to life without parole. "Nick Sutton has gone from a life-taker to a life-saver," the petition said, and "five Tennesseans, including three prison staff members, owe their lives to him." It argued that his jury had never heard about his childhood, his head injuries or the conditions he lived under in prison, and that a man to whom prosecutors had once offered life was not among the worst of the worst. Sharp stressed that Sutton was not asking to be freed. "He would still die in prison, just not by the electric chair," he said.
Seven current and former corrections officials signed affidavits. Eden called him "the most rehabilitated prisoner that I met" in 30 years in maximum-security prisons, said he posed no danger to staff or inmates, and wrote that if Sutton were released he would welcome him into his home. Five of the jurors who sentenced him to death and an alternate juror joined the request.
So did relatives of three of his victims. Lowell Sutton, Dorothy Sutton's nephew, who had known Nick as a boy and called him a "victim of circumstances," wrote that "Nick's execution will only cause more pain and hurt for our family." Charles Maynard, Almon's nephew, now a Methodist minister, said executing Sutton "just ends my uncle's story with another killing," and "to take a life anywhere cheapens life everywhere." His daughter Anna Lee, also a Methodist minister, asked the state not to add "violence on top of violence." Rosemary Estep Hall wrote, "It breaks my heart that Mr. Sutton has lost so much of his life on death row."
Amy Large Cook did not join. She told WBIR she wanted closure and that Sutton had "wasted enough of the taxpayers' money." "I want him to be electrocuted," she said, according to CNN, while adding that for his sake she hoped he had changed.
On Wednesday, February 19, Lee issued a one-sentence statement: "I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and will not be intervening." It was the fourth execution he had allowed to go forward since taking office in 2019.
Tennessee allows prisoners whose crimes were committed before 1999 to choose between lethal injection and electrocution. Sutton chose the chair. He was one of several prisoners who had argued unsuccessfully in court that the state's three-drug injection protocol, which uses the sedative midazolam, amounted to torture. He was the fifth Tennessee prisoner in about 16 months to choose electrocution.
On February 20 the U.S. Supreme Court, without recorded dissent and without explanation, denied two last requests: one arguing that being shown to the jury in shackles had violated due process, the other seeking leave to file a new habeas petition on the prior-violent-felony aggravator. His last meal was fried pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy, and peach pie with vanilla ice cream. He asked his family not to attend. Estep's relatives were entitled to witness and none came. Amy Large Cook was there.
Staff shaved his head, wet his head and legs with saline solution, and fitted the cap and a black hood. At 7:18 p.m. Central time two jolts were delivered over a little under a minute. Witnesses saw his body stiffen and lift partly from the chair; they saw nothing unusual, unlike at the state's previous electrocution, of Lee Hall in December 2019, when smoke or steam had been reported. He was pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m.
In the chair he thanked his wife "for being such a good witness to the Lord" and his family and friends for their efforts to save him. "I'm just grateful to be a servant of God, and I'm looking forward to being in his presence," he said. "And I thank you." In a prepared statement read afterward by his attorney Stephen Ferrell, he said, "I hope I do a much better job in the next life than I did in this one." He did not mention his victims.
A prison official read a statement from Cook. Her brother, she said, had suffered a terrible death, "and for that I will never forgive Mr. Sutton." She said that at least that chapter would be over.
Sutton was the 139th person Tennessee had executed since 1916, the seventh since it resumed executions in August 2018, and the fourth person executed in the United States in 2020. CNN reported he was the first of those seven executed for killing another inmate. The Equal Justice Initiative said he had been the only person on Tennessee's death row sentenced for killing another incarcerated person.
Sutton did not dispute his role in any of the four killings, and all four ended in convictions, two by guilty plea. Several points are disputed or rest on a single account. The date and place of the Large and Almon killings vary between reports, as does the quarry's location (Tennessee or North Carolina). The father's death is given as 1977 by hypothermia in the court record and as a 1976 suicide by WBIR. The co-defendants' fates are given by the Tennessee courts (Street convicted and sentenced to life, Freeman acquitted); one syndicated report reversed them. The reason the pretrial life offer failed is told two ways. The number of people Sutton is said to have saved in prison comes from his clemency petition and supporting affidavits; the courts recognized one such act. The Estep family's account of Carl Estep's violence is Rosemary Hall's. Sutton's claim of self-defense against Estep was rejected by the jury and by every court that reviewed it.
Nicholas Sutton was executed on February 20, 2020. There are no pending proceedings.
About 1961: Nicholas Todd Sutton born; raised in Morristown by his paternal grandmother, Dorothy Sutton.
1973: Restraining order against his father after an armed standoff with police.
1977: His father dies (court record; WBIR says 1976).
November - December 1978: Brief Navy service, honorable discharge.
1979: Hamblen County jail; Deputy Howard Ferrell later credits Sutton with stopping an attack on him.
Summer or early fall 1979: John Large, 19, killed near Mount Sterling, North Carolina.
September or October 1979: Charles Almon III, 46, disappears; his Jaguar found near Newport.
December 22 - 25, 1979: Dorothy Sutton disappears; Sutton reports her missing on Christmas Day and is arrested.
December 29 - 30, 1979: Her body is recovered from the Nolichucky River.
May 1980: Almon's body found by divers in a Newport quarry; searches for invented victims.
Hamblen County trial (April, year not stated in sources): convicted of first-degree murder of Dorothy Sutton; life sentence.
1981: Guilty pleas in North Carolina to second-degree murder of Large and Almon; two life terms.
January 15, 1985: Carl Estep stabbed to death at Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility.
1985: Riot at Tennessee State Prison; Officer Tony Eden says Sutton pulled him from armed inmates.
1986: Convicted of Estep's murder in Morgan County; sentenced to death.
October 24, 1988: Tennessee Supreme Court affirms.
1990: U.S. Supreme Court denies review; post-conviction petition filed December 14.
1994: Helps injured unit manager Cheryl Donaldson at Riverbend; marries Reba Sutton, with Eden as best man.
June 25, 1999: Court of Criminal Appeals affirms denial of post-conviction relief.
June 8, 2011: Sixth Circuit affirms denial of habeas relief, 2-1.
2015: Execution date blocked by litigation.
June 8, 2016: Motion to reopen post-conviction proceedings.
January 14, 2020: Clemency petition filed.
January 31, 2020: Court of Criminal Appeals affirms denial of the reopened petition.
February 19, 2020: Gov. Bill Lee declines to intervene.
February 20, 2020: Executed in the electric chair at Riverbend; pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m.