Nashville, Tennessee—Nicholas Todd Sutton, a man who confessed to killing four people including his own grandmother but spent the final decades of his life saving the lives of prison guards and fellow inmates, was executed by electric chair Thursday evening at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. He was 58 years old.
The execution, carried out at 7:18 p. m. Central Time, made Sutton the last person in the United States to die in the electric chair.
His case sparked an extraordinary clemency campaign led not by family members but by the correctional officers who had been paid to keep him locked up.
Sutton killed three people in a four-month span in 1979. The first was his high school friend John Michael Large, 19, whom he beat to death with a blunt object and buried in a shallow grave in North Carolina. The second was Charles Pomeroy Allman III, a 46-year-old contractor from Knoxville whose body Sutton later helped authorities locate.
Then came Dorothy Virginia Sutton, his 73-year-old grandmother. She had taken him in after his father died, a retired school teacher who believed in the troubled teenager. On the night of December 22, 1979, he struck her with a piece of firewood, wrapped her in trash bags, chained her to a cinder block, and threw her alive into the Nolichucky River.
She drowned in the freezing water. Sutton then attended Christmas Eve dinner with family, carrying gifts she had already wrapped.
He was convicted of her murder and received a life sentence. Later, he led investigators to the bodies of Large and Allman in exchange for avoiding the death penalty for those killings. He received three consecutive life sentences.
But in 1985, while incarcerated at the Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility, Sutton killed again. He and three other inmates stabbed fellow prisoner Carl Isaac Estep 38 times after a dispute over drugs. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death.
For the next 34 years, Sutton sat on death row. And during that time, he began to save lives.
Correctional Officer Tony Eden swore in a statement that Sutton intervened when five inmates armed with knives tried to take Eden hostage during a riot. “Nick risked his safety and well-being in order to save me from possible death,” Eden wrote. “I owe my life to Nick Sutton.”
Manager Sharol Donaldson slipped and fell in the prison unit. Sutton rushed to her side, helped her stand, retrieved her keys and radio, and called for assistance. “He did exactly the opposite of what I feared,” she later wrote.
Sutton also cared for Paul House, a fellow death row inmate who developed multiple sclerosis and was denied a wheelchair. Every day, Sutton carried House to the shower and helped him bathe. House was later exonerated and released.
His mother told the governor that “Nick is the only reason Paul is alive today.”
When death row inmate Lee Hall Jr. went blind and was denied a cane, Sutton became his guide, walking him through the unit so he wouldn’t fall. After Hall was executed in December 2019, his parents sent Sutton a Christmas card thanking him.
Seven current and former Tennessee Department of Correction officials supported Sutton’s clemency petition, calling him “an honest, kind, and trustworthy man.” Five jurors who originally sentenced him to death later asked the governor to commute his sentence. Relatives of his victims, including members of his grandmother’s family and Charles Allman’s nephew, also urged clemency.
Despite the overwhelming support, Governor Bill Lee denied the request on February 19, 2020. “After careful consideration … I am upholding the sentence,” he said. No further explanation was given.
On the morning of his execution, Sutton shared communion with his spiritual advisor. His last meal consisted of fried pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy, and peach pie with vanilla ice cream.
Just before the first bolt of electricity struck, Sutton spoke for several minutes. “Don’t ever give up on the power of Jesus Christ to take impossible situations and correct them,” he said. “He has fixed me.
I am looking forward to being in his presence.”
Witnesses reported seeing his body jerk backward, fingers tightening on the armrests. A second bolt followed. After six minutes, the blinds were lowered.
He was declared dead at 7:26 p. m.
Outside the prison, his attorney read a longer statement: “I have made a lot of friends along the way … I hope I do a much better job in the next life than I did in this one.”
Amy Large Cook, whose brother John was killed when she was 11, released a statement. “John was denied the opportunity to live a full life … I will never forgive Mr. Sutton,” she said.
“At least that chapter will be over.”
The question that divided everyone involved remains unanswered: When a man who took four lives spends decades saving lives, does that change what justice demands? The law said he had to die. The officers who knew him best said the law was about to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 the wrong version of the person he had become.
Both sides were true at once. And in the end, only the electric chair had the final word.