Inmate Who Declined to Choose Method Executed

Tennessee executed Harold Wayne Nichols by lethal injection Thursday for the 1988 rape and murder of Karen Pulley, a 20-year-old student at Chattanooga State University. Nichols, 64, had confessed to killing Pulley as well as raping several other women in the Chattanooga area, the AP reports. Although he expressed remorse at trial, he admitted he would have continued his violent behavior had he not been arrested. He was sentenced to death in 1990.

• SCOTUS declines to issue stay. Nichols' attorneys unsuccessfully sought to have his sentence commuted to life in prison, citing the fact that he took responsibility for his crimes and pleaded guilty. His clemency petition stated "he would be the first person to be executed for a crime he pleaded guilty to since Tennessee re-enacted the death penalty in 1978." The US Supreme Court declined to issue a stay of the execution on Thursday.

• Wait was "37 years of hell." In a recent interview, Pulley's sister, Lisette Monroe, said the wait for Nichols' execution has been "37 years of hell." She described her sister as "gentle, sweet, and innocent," and said she hopes that after the execution she'll be able to focus on the happy memories of Pulley instead of her murder.
• His first execution date was in 2020. Nichols has seen two previous execution dates come and go. The state earlier planned to execute him in August 2020, but Nichols was given a reprieve due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, Nichols had selected to die in the electric chair—a choice allowed in Tennessee for inmates who were convicted of crimes before January 1999. Tennessee's lethal injection protocol in 2020 used three different drugs in series, a process that inmates' attorneys claimed was riddled with problems. Their concerns were shown to have merit in 2022, when Gov. Bill Lee paused executions, including a second execution date for Nichols
• New execution protocol. The Tennessee Department of Correction issued a new execution protocol last December that utilizes the single drug pentobarbital. Attorneys for several death row inmates have sued over the new rules, but a trial in that case is not scheduled until April. Nichols declined to choose an execution method this time, so his execution was by lethal injection, the default method.