TENNESSEE DEATH ROW INMATE DECLINES ELECTRIC CHAIR, DEFAULTS TO LETHAL INJECTION
Tennessee death row inmate Harold Wayne Nichols, convicted in 1990 for the 1988 rape and murder of 21-year-old Chattanooga State University student Karen Pulley, declined on Monday to choose between electrocution and lethal injection for his scheduled December 11 execution, prompting the state to default to lethal injection.
Under Tennessee law, inmates convicted before January 1999 may elect the electric chair; Nichols previously chose it for a 2020 execution date that was halted by a COVID-19 reprieve. The 66-year-old inmate has two weeks to reverse his decision, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction.
Nichols, who confessed to Pulley’s murder and multiple other rapes in the Chattanooga area and admitted at trial he would have continued had he not been arrested, faces execution under a revised lethal injection protocol using a single drug, pentobarbital, implemented last December after an independent review revealed that none of the drugs used in seven prior executions since 2018 had been properly tested. Though death row inmates’ attorneys have sued over the new protocol, a trial is not set until April.
Electrocution, while still authorized in several states, has been used only five times nationwide in the past decade—all in Tennessee.
