Overview

• The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned a mid-July order to deactivate Byron Black’s implantable cardioverter-defibrillator before his lethal injection.
• Black, 69, was executed by a three-drug protocol in Nashville on August 5 with his defibrillator still active.
• Witnesses reported that Black gasped and complained of severe pain minutes after the injection began.
• Black’s attorneys had argued he was not competent to be executed due to dementia, heart failure, kidney failure and brain damage.
• The execution was Tennessee’s second of 2025 after a five-year pause as U.S. states carried out more death sentences than in any year since 2015.