Tennessee death row inmate Harold Wayne Nichols on Monday declined to choose between the electric chair and lethal injection for his Dec. 11 execution, meaning the state will default to lethal injection.
Nichols was sentenced to death in 1990 after he was convicted of raping and murdering Karen Pulley, a 21-year-old student at Chattanooga State University, two years earlier. He has two weeks to change his mind about choosing which method will be used, Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson Dorinda Carter said in an email.
He was scheduled to be executed in 2020, and had chosen the electric chair, but was then given a reprieve due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tennessee inmates who were convicted of crimes before January 1999 are permitted to choose electrocution over the state’s preferred method of lethal injection.
The electric chair has only been used to carry out five executions over the last decade, all of which took place in Tennessee. But several other states still have electrocution as an option for the death penalty, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana and South Carolina. In South Carolina, electrocution is the default method of execution if lethal injection drugs aren’t available, according to a 2021 state law.
At the time that Nichols selected electrocution, Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol used three different drugs in series. It was 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 while an independent investigation that he ordered to examine the state’s death penalty procedures got underway, CBS affiliate WDEF reported at the time.
Postponing what had been a second execution date for Nichols, in addition to several others, the investigation was conducted by former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton and came in response to concerns over whether the state’s lethal injection drugs had been properly tested, according to WDEF.
The review of the state’s lethal injection process found that none of the drugs prepared for the seven inmates executed in Tennessee since 2018 had been properly tested.
The Correction Department issued a new execution protocol in last December that utilizes the single drug pentobarbital. Attorneys for several death row inmates have sued over the new protocol, but a trial in that case is not scheduled until April.
Nichols confessed to raping and murdering Pulley as well as several other rapes in the Chattanooga area. Although he expressed remorse at trial, he admitted that he would have continued his violent behavior had he not been arrested.
“I’d just get these feelings and I’d do it. I can’t describe it or understand it,” Nichols said during his trial, according to archived video from WDEF. As the station reported, Nichols tearfully told the jury: “If I could trade places with Karen Pulley, I would.”
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