Murderer Claims He’s Too Retarded For Execution

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A Tennessee man convicted of murdering a young mother and her daughter is asking a state court to overturn his death sentence due to his claimed mental disability.   Travis Loller of the Associated Press reports that Pervis Payne’s execution was halted by the Governor last November, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.   Payne filed his claim one day after the Governor signed a bill into law which prohibits the execution of “intellectually disabled” murderers.  Payne had raised the same claim unsuccessfully in his 2014 appeal in the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals which upheld his conviction and sentence.

Payne was convicted of the 1987 stabbing murders of Charisse Christopher, her 2-year-old daughter Lacie and the attempted murder of 3-year-old Nicholas.  Charisse was stabbed 42 times with a butcher knife with many wounds going all the way through her body.  She had multiple defense wounds.  Her daughter was stabbed 9 times in the chest, abdomen and head.  Nicholas, while stabbed multiple times, survived.  The evidence of Payne’s guilt was overwhelming.  Witnesses put him at the crime scene at the time of the murders.  A responding officer saw him running from the victim’s apartment.  When arrested his cloths were covered with blood of the mother’s and children’s blood type, which were different.  His baseball cap was found at the crime scene and his fingerprints were on beer cans and several surfaces in the victim’s apartment.   At trial, Payne claimed that he did not kill the victims, but entered the apartment to try and help them after seeing a man running from the building.  While witnesses testifying on his behalf said he did not use drugs, Payne was found with cocaine and a hypodermic needle in his pockets.

Payne did raise his mental disability claim at trial and introduced an expert witness who supported that claim, but based upon the sophistication of the crime and the weight of the evidence, a jury found him guilty and his conviction and sentence  have been upheld over 33 years of court review.

 

2 Responses

  1. Steve Milani says:
    May 13, 2021 9:20 am at 9:20 am

    The title to this post is dissappointing and offensive especially for a blog that prides itself on intellectual rigour.

    • Kent Scheidegger says:
      May 13, 2021 11:02 am at 11:02 am

      It is not the wording I would have chosen, but each blogger here has an individual style.

      “Retarded” was, not all that long ago, the accepted term for the group now generally called “intellectually disabled.” The advocacy group for them called itself the American Association on Mental Retardation.

      This is just one of many terms that were once not only okay but preferred, but now the Language Police have declared verboten. I do not think that anyone is obligated to conform to capricious and constantly changing fashion on which terms are allowed and which are not. That is quite different from using a term that is and always has been a slur.