Tennessee’s death penalty is back

Tennessee is set to resume the executions of people on death row, even as more Tennesseans express opposition to it. (Photo by Mike Simons/Getty Images)

Quietly, on Dec. 27, 2024, the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) completed a multi-year lethal injection protocol review ordered by Gov. Bill Lee in 2022. The completed review marked the end of a pause Lee had placed on executions.

The ink was barely dry on TDOC’s report when, on Feb. 14, the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office asked the state Supreme Court to set execution dates for five of the 46 people currently on death row.

This all comes at a time when Gallup reports Americans’ support for capital punishment is at a five-decade low, a drop in support that’s evident even in red states. According to a 2022 Vanderbilt poll, a majority of Tennesseans now oppose the death penalty.

Historically, Tennessee has led the South in efforts to abolish the death penalty  

Tennessee’s history regarding capital punishment is surprisingly progressive, and with no executions in five years, there’s no reason the 2020 execution of Nicholas Sutton shouldn’t be Tennessee’s last.

Moments when Tennessee went against the grain regarding capital punishment include:

• Tennessee became the first state in the nation to turn away from the traditional and mandatory death sentence for convicted murderers in 1838.
• Tennessee was the only former Confederate state to abolish execution in the late 1800s. The state legislature formally ended capital punishment in 1915, reinstating it in 1919.
• Tennessee had one of the longest pauses on executions in the nation, with no executions committed between 1960 and 2000.
• In 1965, Gov. Frank Clement commuted the sentences of everyone on Tennessee’s death row after a bill to abolish capital punishment was defeated by just one vote.
• Tennessee became one of the first of four states to exclude the death penalty for those with intellectual disabilities in 1990.
•  Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, multiple moratoriums were placed on capital punishment while the state reviewed its execution protocols.

Why examine the history? Because it’s not a foregone conclusion that just because Tennessee is a red state, its residents must sit idly by and condone state-sanctioned murder

Why the death penalty must be opposed

Th death penalty is uncivilized in theory and unfair in practice. It must be opposed because:

It can result in the deaths of innocent people. The U.S. criminal justice system is deeply flawed and often makes mistakes. Since 1973, at least 200 people who were on death row were later exonerated. For every eight people executed in the U.S., one person sentenced to death is exonerated, meaning the system is only right 88% of the time. It’s impossible to know how many innocent Americans have been executed before they could be exonerated, because courts don’t entertain claims of innocence for dead people. But civil rights groups have gathered troves of evidence showing dozens of executed prisoners were innocent.

It is not an effective deterrent. The death penalty is often used as a political tool to create the illusion of being “tough on crime” while doing nothing to address the underlying social and economic factors that lead to crime. The states with the highest murder rates all practice capital punishment. Meanwhile, Canada’s murder rate is half what it was when our neighbors to the north abolished their death penalty in 1976.

It is applied unfairly. The death penalty is disproportionately imposed upon those whose victims are white, on offenders who are people of color, and on people who are poor and uneducated. In Tennessee, only 40% of homicides involve white victims, yet 74% of all death sentences are for those convicted of killing white people.

It is a blatant violation of one’s Constitutional rights. The death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, a violation of the Eighth Amendment. According to the ACLU, “It is cruel because it is a relic of the earliest days of penology, when slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace. Like those barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. It is unusual because only the United States of all the western industrialized nations engages in this punishment.”

Cognitive dissonance is the last obstacle to abolishing capital punishment

Though the death penalty feels as well-entrenched as ever and though Tennessee may soon return to executing prisoners, the practice is hanging on by a thread. In Tennessee and other red states, the only group still supporting capital punishment are conservatives.

Why are many conservatives quick to call out inefficiencies and errors in government, yet they’re willing to back the government to the hilt when it comes to the life-or-death decision to carry out an execution? Many conservatives say the government is untrustworthy and makes mistakes all the time, but not on matters of capital punishment?

Granting the government — which can and does make mistakes — the right to kill Americans means handing it immense power with little oversight, something conservatives are typically loath to do. With that in mind, one does not even need to engage in questions about the morality of delivering death as punishment for a crime because the answer to the previous question — can the government be trusted to administer death as punishment? — is no.