Inmate's unusual group of supporters seeks to stop execution

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Death row inmate Nick Sutton has an unusual group of supporters seeking to block his scheduled execution Thursday. Among them are family members of his victims and past and present prison workers calling for clemency.

Sutton, 58, was sentenced to death in 1986 for killing fellow inmate Carl Estep in a conflict over a drug deal while both were incarcerated in an East Tennessee prison. Unless the governor or the courts intervene, Sutton is to be put to death Thursday evening in the electric chair.

Estep’s oldest daughter said Sutton did her family a favor.

“To say that was the best day of my life is an understatement,” Rosemary Hall said of her father’s death in a statement included in Sutton’s clemency petition. “I felt as though a 100-pound weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I thought to myself, ‘There is a God!'"

She called Estep an “evil man” and accused him of setting their house on fire and deliberately causing a traffic accident that killed her baby sister. Estep was in prison for raping Hall’s stepsister when Sutton killed him, she said.

Although Sutton drew the death penalty for Estep’s murder, he was already serving time for three murders he committed in 1979 when he was just 18, including that of his grandmother. In the clemency petition, longtime friends describe a childhood marked by abandonment, abuse and neglect, and later a spiral into drug abuse.

But a recurring theme in the statements supporting the clemency petition is that Sutton today is not the same man who went prison at 18.

“I can confidently state that Nick Sutton is the most rehabilitated prisoner that I met working in maximum security prisons over the course of 30 years,” former Correction Lt. Tony Eden stated in an affidavit...