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On Tuesday, a Tennessee man who was executed for the 1988 shooting deaths of his girlfriend and her two young daughters let out a painful cry.

For the murders of Angela Clay, 29, and her daughters, Latoya, 9, and Lakeisha, 6, Byron Black, 69, was killed by lethal injection.

He attended a church service inside his cell in the morning, according to Mail Online, and at 4.45 am he received his last supper, which consisted of pizza with sausage and mushrooms, doughnuts, and butter pecan ice cream.

On Tuesday morning, when the pentobarbital was coursing through his veins, he was tied to a stretcher, wrapped in a sheet, and had IV lines running to his body at Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Prison, the Tennessean said.

Two minutes after the curtain was drawn in the execution room, Black was heard breathing heavily and letting out a long sigh. Additionally, he repeatedly raised his head off before finally informing his spiritual counselor, “It hurts so bad.”

‘I’m so sorry. Rev. Monica Coakley comforted him by singing, “Just listen to my voice.”

At 10.43, around ten minutes after the execution began, Black was declared dead and spoke of suffering.

For the shooting deaths of Clay, his girlfriend, and her daughters, Black received a death sentence in 1989.

According to the prosecution, he shot them out of jealousy when he found out that Clay was thinking about getting back together with her divorced husband, Bennie Clay, whom Black had slept with the previous year.

At the time of the killings, he had been spending two years for the shooting in a Nashville jail and was on work release.

Black will now have to deal with a greater power, according to Clay’s sister.

In a statement given by a victim’s advocate following the execution, Angela Clay’s sister Linette Bell remarked, “I thank God for making this happen.”

“His family is now going through the same thing we went through 37 years ago,’ she continued. “I can’t say I´m sorry because we never got an apology. He never apologized, and he never admitted it.”

But Black’s longtime attorney Kelly Henry claimed the state “killed a gentle, kind, fragile, intellectually disabled man in a violation of the laws of our country simply because they could.”

She also argued “no one in a position of power, certainly not the courts, was willing to stop them following a back-and-forth in court over whether officials would need to turn off his implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD during the proceedings.”

In court, Henry had contended that if the defibrillator was not correctly deactivated, Black would probably receive numerous shocks during the lethal injection procedure.

Additionally, Black’s attorneys attempted in vain to have a fresh hearing regarding an intellectual handicap they said Black had displayed since birth, with an IQ below 70.

In court filings, they stated that if a new hearing was scheduled, Black would not be eligible for the death penalty. In 2022, Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk requested that a judge revoke Black’s death sentence.

However, the courts ultimately rejected the appeal, holding that Black’s mental capacity was first raised prior to his 1989 trial and that the state’s existing intellectual disability law does not apply to those whose competence has already been determined.

When the Davidson County Chancery Court decided that Black should have his defibrillator disabled prior to the execution, Black’s lawyers seemed to win a minor victory.

The offender may be “subject to the severe pain and suffering of having his heart repeatedly shocked back into rhythm during his execution,” according to a ruling by judges, according to NBC News.

However, the Supreme Court of Tennessee reversed that ruling on Thursday, stating that the other judge lacked the power to impose the modification.

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