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By continuing you agree to our Terms<\/a> and Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n He was heard sighing heavily and breathing heavily, he then repeatedly lifted his head and told his spiritual advisor, \u201cIt\u2019s hurting so bad,\u201d before passing away about ten minutes after the process began.<\/p>\n She then responded: \u201cI\u2019m so sorry. Just listen to my voice,\u201d before comforting him by singing.<\/p>\n Legal experts say this is the first documented case where an inmate was put to death with an active defibrillator still in place, raising questions about the risk of repeated electrical shocks as his heart failed.<\/p>\n Black\u2019s lawyers had long argued that deactivating the device was necessary to prevent unnecessary pain and possible violations of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.<\/p>\n Despite a lower court ruling in their favour, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the decision last week, and both the state\u2019s governor and the US Supreme Court refused to intervene, allowing the execution to proceed.<\/p>\n Black\u2019s legal team, who had sought clemency based on his intellectual disabilities as well as concerns about prolonged suffering, called the execution a violation of human rights.<\/p>\n Black\u2019s longtime attorney Kelly Henry criticised the execution, saying the state \u201ckilled a gentle, kind, fragile, intellectually disabled man in a violation of the laws of our country simply because they could.\u201d<\/p>\n She also maintained that \u201cno one in a position of power, certainly not the courts, was willing to stop them\u201d even after extensive legal arguments over whether the officials should deactivate his implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) prior to the execution.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Angela Clay\u2019s family said the execution brought some measure of closure, nearly four decades after the killings.<\/p>\n Black received the death penalty in 1989 for fatally shooting his girlfriend, Angela Clay, and her two daughters. According to prosecutors, he acted out of jealousy after learning that Clay might reconcile with her estranged husband, Bennie Clay, who Black had already shot the previous year.<\/p>\n At the time of the murders, Black was on work release from a Nashville jail, serving a two-year sentence for the earlier shooting.<\/p>\n After the execution, Clay\u2019s sister said that Black would now be judged by a higher power.<\/p>\n \u201cI thank God for making this happen,\u201d Linette Bell, Angela Clay\u2019s sister, said in a statement that was read by a victim\u2019s advocate.<\/p>\n \u201cHis family is now going through the same thing we went through 37 years ago,\u201d she added. \u201cI can\u2019t say I\u2019m sorry because we never got an apology. He never apologised and he never admitted it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Tennessee death row inmate, Byron Black, 69, cried out in pain during his execution on Tuesday after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48551,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40,1720],"class_list":["post-48550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Byron](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/bc66344f2b28d8abb1440e9d82e287a540186458.jpg\")
Byron Black 1989 Credit: X<\/p>\n