SUB-HEADING: "In the Wake of Execution, Byron Black’s Lawyers Look for Cause of Pain from Lethal Injection. Federal Public Defender Kelley Henry said early evidence shows Black’s defibrillator did not shock him, but the state looks to block discovery in related court litigation
GIST: "In the first examination of Byron Black following his execution, Federal Public Defender Kelley Henry said on Friday that his defibrillator likely did not shock him during his execution.
It will be 8-12 weeks before Black’s autopsy and toxicology reports are available. Witnesses to last Tuesday’s lethal injection said Black lifted his head off the gurney during the execution, groaned and said, “Oh, it’s hurting so bad.”
But Henry warned that an examination of precisely what was causing Black pain — the lethal dose of pentobarbital he received should have rendered him unresponsive within seconds of hitting his system — may go unanswered.
Her team plans to submit public records requests to gather more information. According to Henry, the chancery court had previously ruled her team could conduct discovery with the names of the execution’s participants redacted. Now, the state has filed an appeal to shut down all discovery in the case.
“So much is shrouded in secrecy because of the laws in Tennessee,” Henry told the Banner.
She said the state has not shared who supplied the pentobarbital, raising the concern that the drug had been diverted from a legitimate commercial channel by people who profited from its sale.
“There’s an incentive in those circumstances for the people who have diverted the drugs to adulterate them in some way,” she said. Henry hopes to learn from toxicology and autopsy reports what the pentobarbital potency was, whether it had contaminants and if Black’s lungs indicate pulmonary edema.
After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay Black’s execution on Aug. 4, Henry said the state filed a motion on the same day to stay all proceedings, which would prohibit Henry from conducting discovery on the pentobarbital’s source. A hearing for the state’s motion is set for Aug. 22.
Henry, who stated at the press conference after Black’s execution that her client had been “tortured,” underlined her conviction in the statement announcing the evaluation of Black’s defibrillator.
“Make no mistake, we all saw with our own eyes that the pentobarbital did not work like the State’s expert testified that it would,” Henry said in the statement. “Mr. Black suffered.”
Executions present what Dr. Jonathan Groner, a professor of surgery at the Ohio State University College of Medicine who studies botched executions, calls the Hippocratic paradox: medical practitioners are the most able to make sure Black’s execution went humanely, but they are ethically forbidden from doing so.
Groner has examined two survivors of lethal injection and said, “It was all about the IV access. They couldn’t get the IVs in.”
“When there are problems at lethal injections, in my research, the vast majority of time it’s IV access,” he added.
Black was also a tough candidate for easy IV administration: elderly, in poor health and possibly dehydrated or anxious moments before his death.
“A doctor clearly could have made this acute execution go smoothly, but it’s against the doctor’s efforts,” Groner said. “A nurse working in a pre-op surgical unit might do 20 or 30 a day. An EMT in the prison that they’ve hired to do this might do one a month. IV insertion is a practice-based skill; reading about it doesn’t help. You do a lot of them to be really confident.”
Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti responded to Henry’s announcement that the defibrillator did not activate by stating Black chose lethal injection as his way to die. “And while Black’s attorney now criticizes the use of pentobarbital for his lethal injection, Black previously sued demanding pentobarbital and stated in a court filing that pentobarbital ‘significantly reduces the substantial risk of serious pain’ presented by other drugs,” Skrmetti said in a statement.
“Lethal injection was specifically designed to imitate the intravenous induction of general anesthesia,” Groner said. “I have watched thousands of intravenous anesthetic inductions in my career as a surgeon, and I never heard a sentient human say ‘It’s hurting so bad.’ Intravenous anesthetics cause rapid unconsciousness in seconds.
“The fact that he wasn’t immediately out means it wasn’t doing the right thing in my opinion.”
The Tennessee Department of Correction announced a new lethal injection protocol that would use the single drug of pentobarbital in December 2024 after Gov. Bill Lee granted Oscar Franklin Smith a temporary reprieve on his execution in May 2022 due to an “oversight” in the then-three-drug lethal injection preparation. Tennessee executed Smith on May 22, the state’s first under the single-drug protocol, and witnesses said he closed his eyes and lay motionless until pronounced dead.
There is a dispute over pentobarbital’s effects and whether death by the drug amounts to torture. Henry said the state claims pentobarbital renders a person unconscious within 20 seconds of its injection, so the person feels no pain while being executed. Black began exhibiting distress three minutes after he began receiving the pentobarbital, lifting his head while strapped to a gurney and groaning.
The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled Black’s defibrillator did not have to be turned off before his execution, despite the potential for the device to activate during the lethal injection. The TDOC implanted the defibrillator in Black’s chest last year.
Dr. Mayer Rashtian, a cardiac electrophysiologist, said the pentobarbital likely slowed Black’s heartbeat until it stopped beating, which would not cause the defibrillator — a device that kicks in during the rapid, irregular heart rhythm of ventricular fibrillation — to shock him.
“Most likely they gave him the agent, the heart just got paralyzed, it stopped beating, and there would be no reason for the defibrillator to begin,” he said."
The entire story can be read at:
https://nashvillebanner.com/2025/08/11/lethal-injection-pentobarbital-concerns/PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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