On the Sunday before Byron Black was moved from his death row cell to the isolation pod where he would await execution, Carolyn Weaver entered Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, where she regularly visits a different man on death row. Weekend visitation usually takes place in a room limited to four families at a time, and she was used to seeing Black’s younger sister Freda. But that morning, the guards said, “We’re going to do it a little different today.” More of Black’s relatives were coming, and they would have their own room. It was one of the family’s last opportunities to visit Black. He was scheduled to die two weeks later, on August 5.

Black was born and raised in Nashville, less than 20 minutes from the prison. In 1988, when he was 33 years old, he was arrested for murdering his girlfriend and her two young daughters. Though he maintained his innocence, Black was swiftly convicted and sentenced to die. By the time Weaver met him at Riverbend, he had been on death row for over 30 years.

Weaver started visiting the prison in 2021 after reconnecting with an old boyfriend, Gary Wayne Sutton, who has been on death row since 1996. Almost immediately, she learned about Black. “I’ve known about Byron since I started talking to Gary,” she said. “He would call me, and he’d say, ‘I just fixed Byron something for dinner.’ Or he would say, ‘I gotta go get Byron something to eat.’ He was always taking care of Byron.”

Among his neighbors, Black was known as someone who needed help with basic tasks, including bathing and getting dressed. Weaver remembers being taken aback when she first saw him at visitation. “When he first came out, he didn’t have a wheelchair,” she recalled. “They had to put him in one of those office roller chairs and roll him down to visitation. And another inmate did that.”

It was obvious to her that Black’s disabilities were not just physical. “Gary will tell you he’s like a kid,” Weaver said. “He doesn’t even understand how to put a sandwich together.” Interacting with Black, she learned what he meant. “I feel like when I do talk to him, I am talking to a child.” While she found it hard to imagine he could have committed such a heinous crime in his younger days, it was clear to Weaver that he did not pose a threat to anyone now.

Weaver didn’t want to interrupt Black’s visit with his relatives. But she briefly got permission to approach their room to say goodbye. “He feels like a family member that we’re gonna lose,” she said. She hugged him and “told him how much we loved him and that we’re still praying that this is not gonna happen.” Two days later, on July 22, Black was taken away. That night, Weaver got a call from Sutton. “He goes, ‘It doesn’t seem right. He’s not here. And I’m not fixing his supper.’”

A Relic Of Another Age

Black is 69 years old and in increasingly poor health. Along with psychological exams that have repeatedly found him to have an intellectual disability, medical records show brain damage, dementia, diabetes, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure. Death row advocate Dan Mann echoes what Weaver described, saying that Black’s neighbors treat him with care. “They protect him,” he said. Those who know Black say he is a “people-pleaser”: “He’ll tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear, whether or not that thing is grounded in reality.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has held for more than 20 years that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In its landmark 2002 decision Atkins v. Virginia, the court ruled that “because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses,” people with intellectual disabilities “do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct. Moreover, their impairments can jeopardize the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings.”

But the protections of Atkins have been far from a guarantee. The justices left it to individual states to decide how to apply the ruling, leaving lower courts free to make life and death decisions based on arbitrary, often unscientific standards. This problem has been compounded by the onerous procedural barriers that routinely prevent people on death row from getting back into court. While our understandings of intellectual disability have continued to evolve in the past few decades, death sentences rooted in flawed and discriminatory ideas have remained intact. Although 144 people have seen their death sentences vacated under Atkins, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, dozens have been executed in spite of it.

Lawyers for Black have spent decades fighting to prove his intellectual disability in court. Just a few years ago, they had good reason to believe his life might be spared. Propelled by the high-profile case of Pervis Payne — whose death sentence was eventually reduced to life amid concerns about his........

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