Payne had been scheduled to be put to death last December, but the execution was delayed after the governor granted him a reprieve because of the COVID-19 pandemic.ĭuring Monday’s hearing, Payne’s supporters testified he was a kind, helpful person who liked to dance with his sister, cut his neighbors’ grass, give parishioners rides to the church where his father was a pastor, play drums in the church band, and served as a model inmate at the maximum security prison in Nashville where he has been held. The case has drawn national attention from anti-death-penalty activists and includes the involvement of the Innocence Project, which argues for the use of DNA testing in cases claiming wrongful conviction. Payne’s lawyers have said the new law was critical in freeing Payne from death row. Bill Lee signed a bill this summer making Tennessee’s law retroactive in prohibiting the execution of the intellectually disabled, Tennessee had no mechanism for an inmate to reopen a case to press an intellectual disability claim. Supreme Court found they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.īut until Republican Gov. Her office initially contested the intellectual disability claims, but backed off after he was found mentally disabled.Įxecutions of the intellectually disabled were ruled unconstitutional in 2002, when the U.S. He said he panicked when he saw a white policeman and ran away.ĭuring his trial, prosecutors alleged Payne was high on cocaine and looking for sex when he killed Christopher and her daughter in a “drug-induced frenzy.” Shelby County district attorney Amy Weirich has said the evidence overwhelmingly points to Payne as the killer. He told police he was at Christopher’s apartment building to meet his girlfriend when he heard the mother, who was white, screaming and tried to help. Payne, who is Black, has always maintained his innocence.
Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Paula Skahan heard testimony from family and friends of Payne, who will be sentenced to two terms of life in prison by Skahan, the same judge who vacated his death sentence Nov. The video was entered into evidence during a sentencing hearing in the case of Payne, who received the death penalty for the 1987 killings of Charisse Christopher and her 2-year-old daughter, Lacie Jo, but was removed from death row after court experts found him intellectually disabled. Just feet away, the man convicted in the fatal stabbings 34 years ago, Pervis Payne, sat motionless as the footage showed the mother lying on her back and her daughter on her stomach, lifeless and awash in red.
Family members of a slain woman and her daughter sat through a gruesome crime scene video that played in a Tennessee courtroom Monday - images of two blood-soaked bodies lying stabbed to death in awkward positions on the floor of their apartment, a knife resting next to the little girl’s foot.