Stephen Lynn Hugueley spent almost his whole life in the custody of the State of Tennessee, and three people died at his hands along the way. In 1986, at the age of 18, he received a life sentence for the first degree murder of his mother, Rachel Waller of Dyer County. In 1991, while serving that sentence near Henning, he killed a fellow inmate, James Shelton, and was convicted of a second first degree murder the following year. In 1997 he tried to kill another inmate, and in 1998 he was convicted of criminal attempt to commit first degree murder. On January 17, 2002, at the Hardeman County Correctional Facility in Whiteville, he killed Delbert Steed, a 57-year-old member of the staff.
At his trial in September 2003 Hugueley told the jury that the killing of Steed was intentional and premeditated and that he wanted to die for it. The jury convicted him of first degree premeditated murder in less than half an hour and sentenced him to death that afternoon. There was no quick march to the death chamber. Instead came eighteen years of litigation over a single question: whether a man who kept asking to be executed was competent to make that choice. State courts said he was. Federal courts declined to disturb those findings. On March 29, 2021, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear his last appeal, and on July 13, 2021, the State of Tennessee asked for an execution date. Three days later, on July 16, he was found dead at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The Tennessee Department of Correction said he appeared to have died of natural causes.
Hugueley was born in 1968, and he was 14 in January 1983. His father died by suicide, and both sides of his family carried histories of mental illness. A psychologist who evaluated him decades later described the household as a very dysfunctional one. At the age of ten he was sent for evaluation at a mental health center in the northwest of the state.
From then on his life was shaped by institutions. In January 1983, at 14, he was moved from one juvenile facility to another. His juvenile file records repeated self-injury and a series of psychiatric medications. In December 1983, after a suicide attempt, he was placed in medical isolation. A full-scale IQ of 78 was recorded in his juvenile years, and a Stanford-Binet test in 1983 gave a score of 77. That same year an evaluating psychologist, Tom Biller, wrote of "deeply rooted antisocial tendencies." In June 1984 the state certified him as severely emotionally disturbed, which qualified him for special education. His lawyer said after his death that he had spent less than two years outside institutions from the age of 12 onward.
Later testing produced very different numbers. In 2003 a neuropsychologist, Dr. Pamela Auble, recorded a full-scale IQ of 98, and in 2008 a court-appointed psychologist put his verbal IQ at 127. Across the years his diagnoses ran from intermittent explosive disorder and antisocial personality disorder to bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia and persecutory delusional disorder, with narcissistic and borderline personality disorders also considered. Which of these labels fit him, and what they meant for his capacity to stand trial and to give up his appeals, became the central dispute of his case.
Rachel Waller was Hugueley's mother. She lived in Dyer County, Tennessee. Records gathered for his later appeals noted that she had been afraid of her son.
Hugueley killed her when he was 18. He was convicted of her first degree murder, and in August 1986 he received a life sentence. The judgment of 1986 for first degree murder was the first entry in the criminal history that later supported his death sentence, and in the federal litigation he did not dispute that he was responsible for her death.
In the same year a brain scan in July showed a lesion, and doctors found a benign tumor in August. On October 31, 1986, he was admitted to the hospital at the Tennessee State Prison, and surgeons removed a tumor from the right frontal area of his brain. A small tumor was found again on follow-up, and he declined further surgery. A later electroencephalogram was normal, and a later CT scan showed no tumor. A diagnosis of sociopathic personality disorder was made in 1986 as well.
In 1991 Hugueley was held at the West Tennessee High Security Facility near Henning, in Lauderdale County. The state later merged that prison into the West Tennessee State Penitentiary, renaming it in 1999. There, in 1991, he killed a fellow inmate, James Shelton.
The killing led to a second conviction for first degree murder, entered in 1992 while Hugueley was already serving his life sentence. When prosecutors later introduced his criminal history by agreement of the parties, the conviction for the murder of James Shelton stood as the second of his prior violent felonies.
Six years after the death of James Shelton, Hugueley was held at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary at Petros, in Morgan County, then the state's maximum security prison. The institution had opened in 1896 and closed in 2009. In 1997 he tried to kill another inmate there. The other man survived. In 1998 Hugueley was convicted of criminal attempt to commit first degree murder, his third violent felony conviction.
He was later moved again. By the start of 2002 he was held at the Hardeman County Correctional Facility in Whiteville, a medium security prison in West Tennessee. The facility is owned by the Hardeman County Correctional Facilities Corporation and run under contract by CoreCivic, the company formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, and the state contracts for its beds.
Delbert Steed was 57 years old in January 2002 and worked at the Whiteville facility. The state's memorial to Department of Correction employees who died in the line of duty lists him among the fallen, with an end of watch of January 17, 2002, at the Hardeman County Correctional Center.
At the sentencing hearing in 2003 his older brother told the jury how much Delbert had done for the family and how hard his death had fallen on them.
Hugueley had a long-running grievance against Steed. He told an internal affairs investigator afterward that the two had clashed repeatedly, that Steed had threatened to write him up, and that Steed claimed to be "friends with these gangs." At trial he testified that he had filed grievances, asked for cell changes and requested anger management classes, and that he had done all of it in an effort to get away from Steed. Steed, he said, "had a smart ass mouth," and that was the source of their problem.
On January 17, 2002, Hugueley killed Steed inside the facility, and he submitted to custody there. The Tennessee Supreme Court later found that the killing involved serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death, and that Steed was performing his official duties when he died.
Hugueley made no secret of his intentions afterward. In May 2003 he wrote to the district attorney that he had "no regret or remorse" and that he had "fully intended to kill others that day." He also testified that he had always been treated decently in Department of Correction facilities and had never before had an altercation with an employee.
The case went to the Circuit Court for Hardeman County, before Judge Jon Kerry Blackwood. The district attorney general for the district, Elizabeth T. Rice, and her assistants Terry D. Dycus and Colin Campbell prosecuted. F. Michie Gibson Jr. and T. J. Cross-Jones of Nashville defended.
Hugueley was not an easy client. He had outbursts in court at his arraignment in May 2002 and at a motion hearing in December 2002. He was evaluated before trial. Dr. Keith Caruso examined him in June 2003 and diagnosed intermittent explosive disorder among other conditions, and Dr. Auble, the neuropsychologist, ruled out depressive and psychotic disorders and noted a possible antisocial personality disorder. Both found him competent to stand trial. He was found competent in September 2003, when the trial began, and competent to testify. A CT scan in 2003 showed no abnormality.
The trial opened on September 15, 2003. Jury selection produced the first of the issues that later went to the state's highest court: the prosecution used peremptory challenges to remove eight African-American prospective jurors, and the defense objected that the strikes were based on race and, as to several women, on gender. The trial court accepted the reasons the prosecutors gave. A juror whose half-brother was a correctional officer and a prosecution witness was also left on the panel over the defense's objection.
The state called six witnesses in the guilt phase. The defense called two: one other witness and Hugueley himself. On the stand he acknowledged that his actions were intentional and premeditated and repeated that he had always wanted the death penalty. Under cross-examination he gave the line that later opened the Tennessee Supreme Court's account of his testimony: "In the world I live in, you die for disrespect."
The jury retired at 11:33 a.m. on September 16, 2003, and returned at noon with a verdict of guilty of first degree premeditated murder.
The penalty phase began the same day. By agreement, the prosecution put before the jury his three earlier judgments: first degree murder in 1986, first degree murder in 1992 and attempt to commit first degree murder in 1998. The state called four witnesses, including Steed's brother.
In a colloquy with Judge Blackwood, Hugueley waived his right to present mitigating evidence. He did not testify at the sentencing stage. His lawyers asked that his social history be entered as an exhibit, and they placed mitigation material on the record, but the only evidence before the jury that resembled mitigation was his own guilt-phase account of how Steed had treated him.
The jury found four aggravating circumstances: that he had previous convictions for felonies involving violence to the person; that the murder fell within the statutory circumstance for killings involving "serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death"; that he committed it while in lawful custody or in a place of lawful confinement; and that it was committed against a corrections employee. The jury found that these outweighed any mitigating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt, and at 4:07 p.m. it returned a sentence of death.
After the verdict Hugueley tried to dismiss his lawyers, give up his motion for a new trial and waive his direct appeal. The trial court granted those requests. He then filed his own motion for a new trial, saying he had waived it only because he had misunderstood the law. The court appointed counsel, and the motion was filed and denied in December 2003. In a letter dated December 18, 2003, he asked to represent himself on appeal, and at a hearing on January 13, 2004, he said he did not want to appeal his death sentence at all. Judge Blackwood found his waivers "knowing, intelligent and voluntary."
Tennessee law did not allow the matter to end there. Under the state's death penalty statute, a sentence of death is reviewed automatically, whatever the defendant wants. Hugueley later revoked his waiver, and on May 12, 2004, the Tennessee Supreme Court sent the case back for the appointment of counsel. The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence on March 17, 2005.
The Tennessee Supreme Court heard the case at its November 2005 session in Jackson and filed its opinion on March 15, 2006. Justice Cornelia A. Clark wrote for the court, joined by Chief Justice William M. Barker and Justices E. Riley Anderson and Janice M. Holder.
The court rejected each of the claims of error. Three of the eight challenged jury strikes had not been preserved for review. As to the other five, the prosecution's reasons, chiefly the jurors' reservations about the death penalty and one juror's demeanor, were race-neutral. The court called the trial judge's findings "barely adequate" but found no clear error, and it reached the same result on the gender claim. On the juror with a relative among the witnesses, it held that no incompetent juror had been forced on the defense: "Juror bias must be shown, not just suspected." The written instruction on the corrections employee aggravating circumstance had left out the requirement that the defendant knew, or reasonably should have known, that the victim was engaged in his official duties, but Hugueley had admitted knowing exactly who Steed was, and the court held the omission harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.
In its mandatory review the court found that the sentence had not been imposed arbitrarily, that the evidence supported all four aggravating circumstances and their weight over the mitigating evidence, and that the sentence was neither excessive nor disproportionate. It wrote that the defendant "has demonstrated no potential for rehabilitation." The court affirmed and set his execution for August 15, 2006.
Justice Adolpho A. Birch Jr. wrote separately. He concurred in affirming the conviction, though he said he was troubled that all eight of the prosecution's peremptory strikes had been used against African-American jurors; the thin record and "the paucity of trial court findings" kept him from finding an error he could act on. He dissented from the death sentence on the ground that the court's method of comparative proportionality review was "inadequate to shield defendants from the arbitrary and disproportionate imposition of the death penalty."
The execution date of August 15, 2006, did not hold. On July 24, 2006, Hugueley filed a petition for post-conviction relief on his own and asked for a lawyer. The Office of the Post-Conviction Defender was appointed, and Kelly Gleason took the case. Within months he changed course. In November 2006 he told the court he wanted to withdraw the petition, and in December 2006 he wrote asking that it be dismissed. He later said he had signed it only "to stall long enough" to resolve problems with his visits while he was on death watch.
Gleason pressed on. In January 2007 she filed an amended petition raising 31 claims, among them that his trial lawyers had been ineffective for failing to seek a competency hearing and for allowing him to waive mitigation. On January 16, 2007, the post-conviction court, now presided over by Judge J. Weber McCraw, found that a genuine question about his competence had been raised. The Court of Criminal Appeals declined to hear an interlocutory appeal on June 12, 2007, and on June 22, 2007, Hugueley repeated that he wanted out.
In August 2007 Gleason filed the records from his trial, a mitigation report and affidavits from Dr. Caruso and Dr. Auble. Both had found him competent before trial, and both now said a fresh evaluation was warranted; Dr. Auble wrote that competency "is not static" and urged brain imaging to rule out a return of the tumor. The court denied funding for defense experts and for the scans. On December 3, 2007, it found again that there was a genuine question about his competence to withdraw and ordered an evaluation under the Tennessee Supreme Court's rule for capital post-conviction cases.
The evaluation stalled. On January 23, 2008, the court appointed Dr. John Hutson, suggested by the state, and Dr. Peter Brown, suggested by the defense. Dr. Hutson's report of February 29, 2008, found Hugueley competent, but it was set aside because the District Attorneys General Conference had paid him by mistake. Dr. Brown never began his evaluation despite repeated extensions. On July 24, 2008, the court removed both. On August 1, 2008, it appointed Dr. Bruce Seidner, a psychologist from the state's list.
Dr. Seidner testified at an evidentiary hearing on November 14, 2008. He found Hugueley "really quite capable," found no depression and no impairment of his capacity, and placed his reading at about a fourth-grade level. He noted a high score for suicide risk but did not read it as a sign of extreme depression. Hugueley told the court, "I want to withdraw it," and said he wanted the matter "solved" and wanted it understood that he was not mentally unstable. When asked about further testing he said, "I don't like taking tests and I'm not going to take another one."
On January 8, 2009, Judge McCraw found him competent and dismissed the petition. The order found that he had a "broad grasp" of his legal position and a "remarkable ability to manipulate and bend the system," and that even if he suffered from a mental disease, it did not prevent him from understanding his situation or making a rational choice.
The withdrawal became final thirty days after the order, on February 7, 2009. On August 10, 2009, Hugueley signed an affidavit seeking to revoke it. The Court of Criminal Appeals held the attempt untimely under its precedent in Pike v. State and declined to extend the thirty-day period on account of imprisonment or mental illness, reasoning that such a rule would apply to nearly every petitioner. It described his threats and demands as part of a pattern of manipulation. On June 8, 2011, in an opinion by Judge John Everett Williams, joined by Judges David H. Welles and Camille R. McMullen, it affirmed the dismissal in every respect. Rehearing was denied on July 27, 2011, and the Tennessee Supreme Court declined review on December 13, 2011.
On August 20, 2009, Hugueley filed his own petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. The case was stayed while the state proceedings ran their course and reopened on February 26, 2013. His lawyers filed a second amended petition on November 8, 2013, raising twelve claims, from the jury strikes and the mitigation waiver to the effectiveness of his lawyers at trial and on appeal.
In 2013 the federal case produced the first MRI scans of his brain. Dr. George Woods, a psychiatrist who examined him four times between 2001 and 2014, and Dr. Siddhartha Nadkarni, of the neurology and psychiatry faculty at New York University, read them as showing underdevelopment of the brain. A neuropsychologist, Dr. Erin Bigler, described reduced hippocampal volume and an enlarged temporal horn. Dr. Woods diagnosed a major neurocognitive disorder and bipolar disorder due to a medical condition, and in a letter of September 17, 2014, he gave his opinion that Hugueley had been incompetent at his trial, incompetent when he withdrew his post-conviction petition, and incompetent still. Dr. Nadkarni examined him on April 22, 2015, and in an addendum of May 28, 2015, found him incompetent under the federal standard.
On September 26, 2014, Hugueley's aunt filed a petition for a writ of error coram nobis on his behalf in the Circuit Court for Hardeman County, arguing that the new imaging and opinions were newly discovered evidence. The court dismissed it on June 7, 2016. On June 28, 2017, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in an opinion by Judge Alan E. Glenn. It held that the petition was years out of time, that the claims repackaged long-known mental health problems with new experts who disagreed with earlier ones, and that coram nobis was the wrong vehicle, since incompetency would have prevented any judgment at all rather than produced a different one.
On August 3, 2017, Judge J. Daniel Breen of the Western District granted the warden summary judgment and denied the petition in full. He held several claims procedurally defaulted by the withdrawal of the state petition and found the rest without merit, but granted a certificate of appealability on a single legal question about appellate counsel. The Sixth Circuit narrowed the appeal to whether his trial lawyers had been ineffective.
On July 1, 2020, a Sixth Circuit panel of Judges Danny Boggs, Richard Griffin and Raymond Kethledge affirmed, in an opinion by Judge Boggs. Hugueley was represented on appeal by Amy D. Harwell and Dee R. Goolsby of the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee. The court held that the federal cases on competence to be executed did not govern a prisoner's competence to give up state post-conviction review, and that Hugueley had in any event received a fair hearing. It held that his post-conviction lawyer had raised the ineffectiveness claim properly and in good faith, so her work did not cause the default; his own withdrawal did. Rehearing was denied on August 20, 2020.
His last petition reached the Supreme Court of the United States on January 19, 2021. The Court denied certiorari on March 29, 2021, and on June 28, 2021, it denied him leave to file a petition for rehearing.
For the last eighteen years of his life Hugueley was held in solitary confinement, by 2019 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. In 2019 he sued Tennessee Correction Commissioner Tony Parker and other officials in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, alleging that seventeen years in the most restrictive form of segregation, without rational justification or meaningful review, had seriously harmed his mental and physical health. On August 16, 2019, the court allowed his claims under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to proceed against the officials who signed his monthly confinement reviews, dismissing the claims against Commissioner Parker for lack of personal involvement.
On Tuesday, July 13, 2021, he filed a paper in that case accusing the department of using his coming execution either to "compel me to commit suicide, like my father" or to "coerce me into settling for less than I want." On the same day the state moved in the Tennessee Supreme Court to set an execution date.
Hugueley was pronounced dead at Riverbend on Friday, July 16, 2021. He was 53. The Department of Correction announced that he had died of apparent natural causes and that the official cause awaited the medical examiner.
Amy Harwell, his lawyer, learned of the death in a call from a prison chaplain that morning. She said he had been suicidal for years, but that the department was telling her "they do not think it was suicide." She described him as a "profoundly damaged individual" when he entered the department's custody and said he had spent his last eighteen years in solitary confinement with "severely limited interaction with other humans," "systematically denied access to treatment and basic health care." The years of that treatment, she said, had taken "a tremendous physical and mental toll" on him.
The department's chronology of capital punishment in Tennessee records his death in a single line for 2021: the death row offender Steven L. Hugueley, sentenced in 2003 in Hardeman County for first degree murder, died of apparent natural causes. He was never executed.
Tennessee's death penalty statute makes appellate review of a death sentence automatic. The Tennessee Supreme Court must review both the conviction and the sentence and decide four questions in every case: whether the sentence was imposed arbitrarily, whether the evidence supports the jury's findings of statutory aggravating circumstances, whether it supports the finding that those circumstances outweigh any mitigating ones, and whether the sentence is excessive or disproportionate to the penalty in similar cases. In Hugueley's case that review ran through the Court of Criminal Appeals first. It is why his early efforts to waive his appeal did not end the case.
Post-conviction review is different. A prisoner under sentence of death may give it up, but the Tennessee Supreme Court's Rule 28 surrounds that choice with safeguards. The trial judge must address the prisoner in open court and find, on a recorded hearing, that he does not want to pursue post-conviction proceedings, understands the consequences, is acting knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily, and is competent. The prisoner is presumed competent. If a genuine question arises, the court appoints one or two mental health professionals from lists submitted by the state and by the prisoner's counsel, and if the question survives their reports, it holds a separate evidentiary hearing and makes detailed written findings. An order allowing withdrawal becomes final thirty days after it is entered. Every stage of Hugueley's post-conviction case, from the first finding of a genuine question in 2007 to the deadline that passed in February 2009, followed that sequence.
The last step also has its own rule. The Tennessee attorney general may ask the state Supreme Court to set an execution date only after a death sentence has survived appeals through the state courts and the Supreme Court of the United States; the state court then schedules the execution. The denial of rehearing in Washington on June 28, 2021, cleared that path in Hugueley's case, and the motion followed fifteen days later. In 2020 Governor Bill Lee had issued a reprieve from executions because of COVID-19.
Hugueley's competence was never settled to the satisfaction of all the experts who examined him. Every court that ruled on it found him competent: the trial court in 2003, the post-conviction court in 2009, the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2011 and 2017, and the federal courts in 2017 and 2020, which declined to disturb those findings. Against that stand the later opinions of Dr. Woods and Dr. Nadkarni, built on the 2013 MRI scans, that he was incompetent at trial and afterward. The state courts treated those opinions as a disagreement among experts about old problems, not as new evidence.
He later asserted that he had pleaded guilty in his mother's case after being told, wrongly, that his brain tumor would kill him. That claim was his own and was not established in any court.
The exact cause of his death was left pending the medical examiner's ruling. The department said it appeared natural; his lawyer said he had been suicidal for years. A final ruling has not been reported.
1968: Stephen Lynn Hugueley is born.
January 1983: At 14, he is moved between juvenile institutions.
December 1983: He is placed in medical isolation after a suicide attempt.
June 1984: He is certified as severely emotionally disturbed.
1986: He is convicted of the first degree murder of his mother, Rachel Waller of Dyer County; life sentence imposed in August.
October 31, 1986: Surgery removes a benign tumor from his brain at the Tennessee State Prison hospital.
1991: He kills a fellow inmate, James Shelton, at the West Tennessee High Security Facility near Henning.
1992: He is convicted of the first degree murder of James Shelton.
1997: He tries to kill another inmate at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary at Petros.
1998: He is convicted of criminal attempt to commit first degree murder.
January 17, 2002: He kills Delbert Steed, 57, at the Hardeman County Correctional Facility in Whiteville.
May 2003: He writes to the district attorney that he has "no regret or remorse."
September 15 to 16, 2003: Trial in the Circuit Court for Hardeman County; guilty of first degree premeditated murder; death sentence returned at 4:07 p.m. on September 16.
January 13, 2004: He tells the trial court he does not want to appeal.
May 12, 2004: The Tennessee Supreme Court remands for appointment of appellate counsel.
March 17, 2005: The Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
March 15, 2006: The Tennessee Supreme Court affirms and sets an execution date of August 15, 2006.
July 24, 2006: He files a post-conviction petition.
January 16, 2007: The post-conviction court finds a genuine question of competency.
November 14, 2008: Competency hearing.
January 8, 2009: He is found competent and the petition is dismissed at his request.
August 20, 2009: He files a federal habeas corpus petition.
June 8, 2011: The Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the dismissal.
2013: MRI scans are obtained in the federal case.
September 26, 2014: His aunt files a coram nobis petition on his behalf.
June 28, 2017: The Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the denial of coram nobis relief.
August 3, 2017: The federal district court denies habeas relief.
August 16, 2019: A federal court allows his solitary confinement suit to proceed in part.
July 1, 2020: The Sixth Circuit affirms the denial of habeas relief.
March 29, 2021: The Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari.
June 28, 2021: The Court denies leave to file for rehearing.
July 13, 2021: The state moves to set an execution date.
July 16, 2021: He dies at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville of apparent natural causes, aged 53.