NASHVILLE — Never before has Tennessee asked to execute so many of the condemned.
Officials here, believing they are free of the latest round of challenges to Tennessee’s death penalty, recently asked the state Supreme Court for execution dates for 10 death row inmates. One of those 10, Billy Ray Irick, is scheduled to die Jan. 15 for raping and killing a 7-year-old Knoxville girl he had been baby-sitting in 1985.
An 11th man, Nickolus Johnson, whose execution was sought separately from the 10, is scheduled to be put to death April 22 for killing a Bristol police officer in 2004.
Those the state has petitioned to execute who don’t yet have dates set include David Miller, who killed a disabled woman with a fire poker in 1981. He has lived on death row ever since, longer than all but one other of the 78 inmates housed in Tennessee’s death row facility at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.Read more at The Tennessean.