NASHVILLE, TN– 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 resort to lethal injection.
Nichols was sentenced to death in 1990 after being convicted of the rape and murder of Karen Polley, a 21-year-old student at Chattanooga State University, two years earlier. “He has two weeks to change his mind about which method to use,” Dorinda Carter, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Corrections, said in an email.
He was scheduled to be executed in 2020, and he had chosen the electric chair, but he was like that at the time Due to postponement Due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Tennessee inmates who were convicted of crimes before January 1999 are allowed to do so Choose electrocution The state’s preferred method is lethal injection. Although many states still allow the use of the electric chair, it has only just been used Five times In the past decade, all in Tennessee.
At the time Nichols chose electrocution, Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol used three different drugs in series. It was a process that the prisoners’ lawyers claimed was riddled with problems. Their fears were proven well-founded in 2022, when Gov. Bill Lee announced Stopped executionsincluding the date of Nichols’ second execution. that Independent review The state’s lethal injection operation found that none of the drugs intended for the seven inmates executed in Tennessee since 2018 were properly tested.
The Department of Correction issued a New implementation protocol Last December who used the only medication Pentobarbital. Lawyers for a number of those sentenced to death The inmates filed a lawsuit on the new protocol, but a trial in the case is not scheduled until April.
Nichols confessed to the rape and murder of Polly as well as several other rapes in the Chattanooga area. Although he expressed remorse during the trial, he admitted that he would have continued his violent behavior had he not been arrested.