Tennessee could execute 4 inmates in next year

Tennessee could execute four death row inmates in the next year.
If that happens, it would mark the first time the state has executed that many inmates in a single 12-month period in more than 50 years.
The state attorney general’s office has asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to set execution dates for Gaile Owens, Stephen Michael West and Billy Ray Irick. A request to execute Edward J. Harbison is expected soon. All were convicted in the 1980s.
A Sept. 28 execution date has already been set for Owens, who was convicted of arranging the contract killing of her husband. Execution dates for Irick and West have not been set.
Tennessee has executed six inmates since 2000, most recently Cecil C. Johnson Jr. of Nashville last December for killing three people during a market robbery. There were no executions between 1961 and 1999.
According to The Tennessean newspaper, death penalty experts and some opponents of capital punishment say the pace of executions in 2010 could well become the rule, not the exception.
“It’s a definite possibility given the numbers we have on our death row and how long some of them have been there,’’ said Stacy Rector, an ordained minister and executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
There are 89 inmates awaiting execution in Tennessee, making the state’s death row the 10th largest in the country. Nearly 40 percent of Tennessee’s death row inmates have been there at least 20 years.
Shelby County District Attorney Bill Gibbons said the capital punishment appeals process is rife with delays that diminish its deterrence to crime.
“A lot of people who are facing the death penalty feel in their own minds they can ride it out for 25 or 30 years,’’ Gibbons said.
Knoxville prosecutor Randy Nichols won one of the state’s first capital convictions after the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. He believes the legal process allows expensive appeals to languish too long.
Nichols believes the state should consider a more streamlined appeals process that would move cases through more quickly.
Others fear this could lead to the execution of innocent people.