Death row inmate with heart implant reported pain as he was executed
Black's attorney said his distress was evidence he was "tortured." Black's legal team had argued his heart implant could create unconstitutional pain during the execution.
At one point, Black told his spiritual adviser, who was with him, it was "hurting so bad," according to witness accounts.
Prison officials took Black into the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution shortly after 10am. He was declared dead at 10:43am.
Multiple media witnesses said Black appeared to be in more distress than inmate Oscar Franklin Smith, who was put to death by lethal injection earlier this year.
The big picture: Black's attorneys asked multiple courts to delay the execution so doctors could deactivate a medical device implanted last year to keep his heart beating normally.
The lawyers said the device could deliver painful repeated shocks in an attempt to restore Black's heartbeat. They argued that would amount to cruel and unusual punishment that violated the U.S. Constitution.
They had also fought to stop the execution because of Black's intellectual disability. Prosecutors agreed the new state standards would make Black ineligible for the death penalty if he were tried today.
Black, 69, was sentenced to death for the 1988 shooting deaths of his girlfriend Angela Clay and her two young daughters, 9-year-old Latoya and 6-year-old Lakeisha.
The Clay family, which provided a statement after the execution, said "a load and burden that has been lifted off our hearts."
"This is closure for my family," Clark's sister wrote in the statement. "My sister and her two daughters can finally rest in peace."
What she's saying: Federal public defender Kelley Henry, who represented Black, said the state had "heartlessly and intentionally traumatized a second family today. A family that matters. A family that is devastated."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Attorney says heart device did not shock Tennessee man in execution who said he was 'hurting so bad'
TENNESSEE-EJECUCIÓN NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee man who said he was 'hurting so bad' during his lethal injection this week for the 1980s killings of his girlfriend and her two young daughters was not shocked by his implanted defibrillator, his attorney said Friday. Kelley Henry, the federal public defender for Byron Black, said her team received an initial evaluation of the data from his implantable cardioverter defibrillator. The ICD information eliminates one possible cause for Black's comment about pain during his execution Tuesday, and other actions such as when he picked his head up off the gurney and groaned, she said. But many questions remain unanswered, she said. 'Make no mistake, we all saw with our own eyes that the pentobarbital did not work like the State's expert testified that it would," Henry said in her statement, referencing Tennessee's execution drug, pentobarbital. "Mr. Black suffered.' Black was executed after a back-and-forth in court over whether officials would need to disable his ICD due to claims it might cause unnecessary, painful shocks to try to fix his heartbeat as the drugs were administered, potentially prolonging the execution. An autopsy report is expected to be released in eight to 12 weeks, Henry said. She also said their team will be making public records requests to try to piece together what happened. She has said this includes access to Black's electrocardiograph readings from the execution. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said Friday that news of the lack of a defibrillator shock was 'just as the state's medical expert predicted and entirely contrary to the confident predictions of Black's expert.' Skrmetti cited Black's numerous failed legal challenges and said, 'Byron Black's execution was entirely legal.' 'Every American has the right to their own opinion about the death penalty, but courts rely on actual facts and actual law, not on theatrics and passion,' Skrmetti said in a statement. Black was convicted in the 1988 shooting deaths of his girlfriend Angela Clay, 29, and her two daughters, Latoya Clay, 9, and Lakeisha Clay, 6. Prosecutors said he was in a jealous rage when he shot the three at their home. At the time, Black was on work-release while serving time for shooting Clay's estranged husband. Black died at 10:43 a.m. on Tuesday, prison officials said. It was about 10 minutes after the execution started and Black talked about being in pain. Ahead of that, when he was asked for any last words, he replied, 'No sir.' Black looked around the room as the execution began, lifting his head off the gurney multiple times, and could be heard sighing and breathing heavily. All seven media witnesses to the execution agreed he appeared to be in discomfort. 'Oh, it's hurting so bad,' Black said, as he lay with his hands and chest restrained to the gurney, a sheet covering up past his lower half, and an IV line in his right arm visible to media witnesses. 'I'm so sorry. Just listen to my voice,' responded his spiritual adviser in the death chamber. In mid-July, a trial court judge agreed with Black's attorneys and ordered officials to have the defibrillator deactivated. But Tennessee's Supreme Court overturned that decision last Thursday, saying the other judge lacked authority to order the change. The state disputed that the lethal injection would cause Black's defibrillator to shock him and said he wouldn't feel them regardless. Before the execution, the state said in a court filing that a "lethal dose of pentobarbital ensures that Black will not be conscious to experience any pain." The state said unconsciousness occurs within 20 to 30 seconds of administering the drug, followed by respiratory arrest and cardiovascular collapse. Black, 69, was in a wheelchair, suffering from dementia, brain damage, kidney failure, congestive heart failure and other conditions, his attorneys have said. They said he had an intellectual disability that should have protected him from execution, but was denied a new hearing because he had already been rejected under older standards. The nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center and Black's attorneys said it's unaware of any other cases with similar claims to Black's about ICDs or pacemakers. Black's attorneys said they haven't found a comparable case, either. Henry also said officials struggled to insert an IV into his left side, and ultimately did after using some medical device, presumably to find a usable vein, Henry said. They seemed to have no trouble getting an IV into Black's right side, she said. That process is not viewed by media witnesses, whose perspective begins when Black is already strapped in and hooked up to IV lines on the gurney.
Boston Globe
8 hours ago
- Boston Globe
How New England built the Plains
Advertisement But something shifted quickly and irrevocably that night he wrote about in 1854. It began with a man named Anthony Burns. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Burns had stowed away for weeks in the belly of a ship to escape enslavement in Virginia. By the time he stepped ashore in Boston, he had become both free and criminal — property that had, under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, escaped its rightful owner. When federal marshals arrested him on false pretenses, hoping to sneak him back into bondage before the public noticed, Boston erupted. The courtroom became a spectacle. The public was barred. Burns's own lawyer was rendered powerless — forbidden to object, speak, or protect his client in any meaningful way. And in a final insult, a government agent tricked Burns into dictating a letter affirming his status as an enslaved person. The judge empathized with Burns but nonetheless ruled against him. Advertisement Slavery, it turned out, didn't need Southern soil. It could be enforced right in the cradle of abolition, in close proximity to the Boston Common. Amos A. Lawrence in 1880. Wikimedia Commons The city's Black residents, who had always known the fragility of their freedom, mobilized first. The pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury demanded Burns's release. Protests filled the streets. Fearing an uprising, the federal government fortified the courthouse even before the trial had concluded. President Franklin Pierce ordered troops to secure the building. Soldiers lined the entrances, and chains were fastened across the courthouse doors. What changed wasn't just policy. It was perception. The moral quarantine in which elite white New Englanders had sequestered themselves failed. Slavery had entered their bubble. Henry David Thoreau, speaking just weeks after Burns's trial, demanded that his fellow citizens choose moral clarity over legal comfort. 'Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?' he asked. 'Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made?' Amos Lawrence and others like him — well-heeled, genteel, cloistered — took notice. Eventually they also took action, albeit moderated and carried out on their own terms. Calls for a more direct confrontation with slavery were not only imaginable at the time — they were already echoing through New England's streets, pulpits, and newspapers. In the wake of Burns's arrest, some abolitionists demanded open defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. Many had supported similar efforts just three years earlier, when Shadrach Minkins, who had fled enslavement in Norfolk, Va., was forcibly rescued from a Boston courthouse by Black activists and white allies. With the help of the Boston Vigilance Committee, Minkins escaped via the Underground Railroad and reached safety in Canada. Figures like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison urged moral suasion and civil disobedience; others, including activists in Boston's Black community, proposed disrupting the legal process altogether. In this atmosphere of mounting urgency, even violence in the name of freedom was discussed. Advertisement But rather than confronting slavery where it stood and calling for direct abolition or cutting off commercial interaction with the American South, Lawrence chose to abolish only the chances for slavery's expansion. He became treasurer of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, a joint-stock corporation chartered by the Massachusetts Legislature with one aim: to raise funds to send free-soil settlers west to Kansas, in order that they might outnumber pro-slavery forces and tip the future of the American West toward freedom. A war New England hoped to fund, not fight Boston didn't send revolutionaries out west. It sent Congregationalists. Missionaries. Schoolteachers. Families armed with shovels, hymnals, rifles, and righteous intent. The Emigrant Aid Company raised funds through an exhaustive network of some 3,000 churches, many of them Quaker or Congregationalist. 'For Religion,' their circulars promised. 'For Education. For Temperance.' They were advocating a version of abolition that didn't disturb Boston's own social order. It was freedom as export. Righteousness at a distance. The ask was modest — $20 per settler, roughly $700 today. Enough to transport and equip a family to settle Kansas on behalf of abolition. Donations flooded in. The Rev. Horace James from Worcester sent $23.37, boasting of his congregation, 'Never did fingers and thumbs move more nimbly in the performance of any good work.' To him that meant that 'verily there is hope for Kansas.' Others weren't so flush with cash. The Rev. W.C. Jackson from Lincoln, Mass., whose flock scraped together $15, reported, 'Your circular for the Emigrant Aid Society came rather inopportunely for us farmers.' Some ministers like Jonathan Lee from Salisbury, Conn., apologized for the frugality of their flock: 'From my scanty purse a single dollar must be accepted in testimony of my interest in the cause of truth and freedom,' because, Lee wrote, 'I am without pastoral charge or salary.' Others enclosed neat bundles of cash with effusive letters, grateful for a moral cause that could be joined without leaving home. Lawrence threw himself into the effort. He wrote President Pierce — his cousin by marriage — to chide him for failing to protect free-staters. He tracked weapons shipments. He personally funded churches, schools, and armories. He, along with many others, made Kansas a proxy battlefield, a place to perform conviction while sidestepping a harder reckoning with what could be done to stop slavery entirely. Advertisement And Kansas, as it turned out, bled. Missourians — armed and incensed — flooded across the border. Ballot boxes were stuffed. Pro-slavery militias burned pressrooms. In 1856, just as the violence crested, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a searing speech comparing Kansas to a raped virgin and accusing Southern politicians of barbarism. In a more familiar scene, days later, a South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, stormed into the Senate chamber and beat Sumner unconscious with a metal-tipped cane. This was the war New England had hoped to fund rather than fight. But the borders were dissolving. Eventually, the South seceded. And when Kansas did enter the Union as a free state in 1861, its fate had been sealed not by New England idealism but by the absence of Southern senators in Congress. Advertisement When the Civil War gave way to a fractured Reconstruction, Kansas endured not as a solution crafted by New England elites but as a promise seized by Black Americans themselves. As Reconstruction's guarantees faltered, many formerly enslaved people fled the South for the Plains, becoming known as Exodusters. Others, like Edward McCabe, envisioned Kansas not just as a sanctuary but as a staging ground — a terrain on which to build something autonomous and Black. For McCabe, Kansas — and later, Oklahoma — offered a second chance. Edward P. McCabe, circa 1883-1887. Kansas State Historical Society via National Park Service And the names live on. The college town of Lawrence, Kan., bears Amos A. Lawrence's name, a monument to abolitionism at arm's length. In Langston, Okla., the Black town McCabe helped found, street names like 'Massachusetts' signaled to Black settlers that they were heirs to a longer freedom struggle — one rooted in, but no longer dependent on, New England's conscience. The limits of New England's good intentions The West that New England built was funded by abolitionists who had converted not to revolution but to strategy. They filtered their moral convictions through propriety. It's worth asking what their legacy means now. We live in a moment when the very institutions Amos Lawrence once stood for — elite philanthropy, intellectual inquiry, and cautious reform — have come under fire. Harvard, a beacon of New England liberalism, finds itself besieged by accusations from both right and left. Elsewhere, DEI offices are shuttered. History curricula are rewritten. Librarians contend with what books to put on their shelves. Even here, in the bluest of blue states, there's talk of 'indoctrination,' 'wokeness,' and 'elites out of touch.' And here too, migrants are detained often without the norms and sorts of protections we assumed would be durable. Advertisement In the 1850s, Lawrence and his cohort were shaken into action by a single courtroom scene on Court Street. But their response came with a caveat: They would confront injustice without addressing it at home. Today, Court Street is quieter, humming more predictably with foot and car traffic — but the moral decisions we must make haven't gotten easier. Who we detain, whose histories we erase, which freedoms we underfund — all still happen in that old Boston bubble. The difference now is that there's no Kansas to send our convictions to.
San Francisco Chronicle
21 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Justice Department targets New York attorney general, a Trump foe. Here's what to know
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — President Donald Trump's Justice Department is zeroing in on New York Attorney General Letitia James with a subpoena for records related to the $454 million civil judgement she won against Trump for lying about his wealth, a person familiar with the matter has told The Associated Press. The subpoena is part of an investigation into whether James violated Trump's civil rights, another person said. The people could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke Friday to the AP on the condition of anonymity. Another subpoena seeks records related to James' lawsuit involving the National Rifle Association, a person familiar with the matter said. On top of that, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently named a special prosecutor to help conduct a mortgage fraud investigation into James. James has sued Trump and his Republican administration dozens of times over his policies as president and over how he conducted his private business empire. Trump vowed on the campaign trail to seek retribution against his opponents, and the moves against James are among the most serious yet against Trump's political foes by the Justice Department. Here's what to know about James and the escalating investigations: James says she's being politically targeted The Democratic attorney general has denied any wrongdoing and said the mortgage probe is politically motivated. Her personal attorney, Abbe D. Lowell, called the subpoenas 'improper.' 'Weaponizing the Department of Justice to try to punish an elected official for doing her job is an attack on the rule of law and a dangerous escalation by this administration,' Lowell said. 'The art of the steal' James is the first Black woman elected to statewide office in New York, the state's first Black attorney general and the first woman elected to the post. She fixated on Trump during the 2018 campaign, branding him as a 'con man' and pledging to shine a 'bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings.' As soon as she took office, James launched several lawsuits over his immigration and environmental policies. She inherited a state lawsuit against Trump's charitable foundation and steered it to a settlement that included a $2 million fine. She filed another civil lawsuit against Trump in September 2022, alleging that his company deceived banks, insurers and others by overvaluing assets and his net worth on financial paperwork. 'It's the art of the steal,' she said when announcing the case against Trump, turning the title of Trump's book 'The Art of the Deal' against him. Trump says James never intended to be fair In 2024, a New York judge ruled that Trump lied for years about his wealth and ordered him to pay $354.9 million in penalties plus nearly $100 million in interest. Trump is appealing the judgement. He also posted a $175 million bond to halt the state from collecting what he owes and seizing his assets. Trump says his financial statements actually understated his wealth and that any mistakes in the documents were harmless errors that played no role in banks' lending decisions. He and his lawyers repeatedly accused James of engaging in 'lawfare' for political purposes — a claim she denies. Trump has long criticized James′ legal volleys as political theater designed to catapult her to fame. Trump also complained that her comments about him, prior to her election, show she never intended to be fair. 'Corporate death penalty' In her role as a regulator of charities and nonprofit groups registered in New York, James sued the NRA and its longtime leader Wayne LaPierre. A jury last year found that LaPierre misspent millions of dollars and used the organization's funds to pay for an extravagant lifestyle, while the NRA itself failed to properly manage its assets and violated whistleblower protections. A New York judge also banned LaPierre from holding a paid position with the organization for a decade, but declined to appoint an independent monitor to oversee the group. James had sought to dissolve the powerful gun advocacy organization, however a judge ruled that the allegations did not warrant a 'corporate death penalty.' Mortgage fraud investigation FBI Director Kash Patel in May confirmed James was being investigated after a Trump administration official accused her of mortgage fraud. James' lawyer says the accusation was a lie based on a purposeful misreading of documents. The investigation centers on forms James signed in 2023 while helping a niece buy a home in Norfolk, Virginia. One form stated that James intended to occupy the home as her 'principal residence.' But in other documents, James made clear she had no intention of living there. An email to the mortgage loan broker two weeks before she signed the documents stated the property 'WILL NOT be my primary residence.' This week, Bondi named Ed Martin as a special prosecutor to help conduct a mortgage fraud investigation into James, according to the person familiar with the matter. James denied any wrongdoing and called the claim politically motivated. Martin leads the Weaponization Working Group, which is examining Trump's claims of anti-conservative bias inside the Justice Department. Martin's nomination for District of Columbia U.S. attorney was pulled amid Republican lawmakers' concerns about his scant prosecutorial experience and support for Jan. 6 rioters.
