TENNESSEE — Nearly 40 years after the murder of Angela Clay and her two children, the man convicted of the killings, Byron Black, is scheduled to be executed on Aug. 5, 2025.
In a recent article in The Verdict, political scientist Austin Sarat explored the case in detail, focusing on Black’s documented intellectual disability and serious medical complications.
Capital punishment had been on hold in Tennessee since 2022, when Gov. Bill Lee ordered a review of the state’s lethal injection protocols. That pause ended in 2024 when the review was completed, allowing executions to resume. Tennessee, once seen as leading the South in reconsidering the death penalty, has already carried out one execution since then. Black would be the second.
Sarat emphasized that “the man who will be put to death bears little resemblance to the person who carried out that gruesome crime.” Black is now physically and mentally disabled, uses a wheelchair, and suffers from dementia, brain damage and heart failure.
The state of Tennessee has acknowledged that Black is intellectually disabled. According to The Nashville Banner, both his academic records and testimony from childhood friends show early signs of cognitive and developmental impairments. Additional testing confirmed that “Black has an IQ below threshold for identifying an intellectual disability.”
Sarat noted that Black’s mental limitations were evident during his 1989 trial. His lawyers said Black was “delusional about what was going on” and “lacked the ability to process what had been occurring.” He “couldn’t understand how anything in the courtroom affected him, and he didn’t understand the implications of the witnesses’ testimony.”
The 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Atkins v. Virginia stated that “because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses… [people with intellectual disabilities] do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct.” The ruling held that executing intellectually disabled individuals violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
The Court concluded that the death penalty “will not deter nor provide retribution for crimes committed by people with intellectual disabilities… it is nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering, and hence an unconstitutional punishment.”
Nonetheless, Black’s execution remains scheduled due to a Tennessee statute that had blocked individuals from raising intellectual disability claims in state court if their sentences had already been upheld before the 2002 Atkins ruling.
That statute was reversed in 2021 through legislation that allowed death row prisoners to challenge their sentences on the basis of intellectual disability. However, Sarat explained that the new law could not apply to Black because his disability claim had already been denied in 2004.
On July 8, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied Black’s request for a new competency hearing, stating his intellectual disability claim “was fully litigated—repeatedly—in prior proceedings… To the extent Mr. Black is asking this Court to reconsider the standard for competency to be executed and adopt a standard that differs from longstanding precedent from this Court and the United States Supreme Court, we decline to do so.”
Sarat also raised concerns about Black’s heart condition. He has an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) in his chest, which could complicate his execution.
Black had sought a court order requiring the state to deactivate the ICD just before or during the execution. He argued that the drug pentobarbital could trigger the device, prolonging the process and causing severe pain, which would violate the Eighth Amendment.
Though a lower court initially ruled in his favor, the decision was reversed after the hospital managing Black’s care declined to deactivate the ICD at the execution site.
Sarat noted that the Tennessee Supreme Court found that the lower court had “exceeded its authority by, in effect, modifying what the court called its ‘unconditional execution order.’” The court failed to address the substance of Black’s concerns, instead dismissing them on procedural grounds.
In his conclusion, Sarat called on other states to “do better than [what] Tennessee has done in Black’s case.” He warned that when procedural technicalities are prioritized over constitutional rights, and when the humanity of a condemned person is lost to bureaucracy, the moral authority of the legal system is at risk.
