Faith leaders seek to halt Byron Black's Tennessee execution
July 30 (UPI) -- Convicted triple-murderer Byron Black, 69, might elude his scheduled execution on Tuesday morning due to a recently claimed intellectual disability and dementia.
Faith leaders on Wednesday held a clemency and faith rally in Nashville that seeks to have Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee or the Supreme Court halt Black's execution that is scheduled at 10 a.m. CDT on Tuesday.
"The execution of Byron Black is neither loving or just," the Rev. Davie Tucker Jr. said Wednesday in a news release shared with UPI.
"His execution becomes another public example of how everything legal ain't right," Tucker said.
"As a mother who has experienced the devastating loss of my son to violence, my heart breaks for the Clay family and the pain they have endured," said Rafiah Muhammad McCormick, Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty community outreach director, in referring to a victim's family.
She called Black a "man with intellectual disability and dementia" who should receive clemency instead of the death penalty.
Jasmine Woodson, director of Tennessee Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, said Black "has spent over three decades in prison for this crime and will never be released."
"I believe that he should remain behind bars," Woodson added, "but he should not be executed."
Black was sentenced to death after being convicted of murdering his girlfriend, Angela Clay, and her two daughters, Latoya and Lakeisha, in 1989.
His legal team on Tuesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block Black's execution, according to a WTVF report.
Black's legal team says the Tennessee Constitution and the U.S. Constitution prohibit the state from executing Black due to his intellectual disability.
"Every expert who has evaluated Mr. Black has concluded that he is a person with intellectual disability," the legal team's writ of certiorari says.
"His IQ scores on gold-standard individually administered object measures ... all meet the criteria to establish significantly subaverage intellectual functioning," Black's attorneys say.
Black's IQ has been measured several times, with scores falling between 57 and 76, which is well below the average of between 90 and 109 for normal intelligence, they argue.
Black was scheduled for execution on Aug. 18, 2022, but his legal team in June 2021 sought to have him declared intellectually disabled based on recent changes in the state's definition of intellectual disability.
The change to Tennessee's law does not allow felons to seek changes to their prior sentences, so the state is proceeding with the scheduled execution.
Only intervention by the Supreme Court of Tennessee's governor could spare Black from the state carrying out the death penalty.
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