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USA - Tennessee. Reasons Behind Byron Black’s Painful Execution
September 17, 2025: September 17, 2025 - Tennessee. Autopsy Points to Reason Behind Byron Black’s Painful Execution in Tennessee
Byron Black was executed in Tennessee by lethal injection on August 5, 2025. During his execution, Mr. Black unexpectedly and repeatedly groaned over the course of several minutes and audibly told his spiritual advisor that he was in pain. An autopsy released September 10, 2025, provides some explanation. It found evidence of “pulmonary congestion and edema”– defined as an abnormal buildup of fluid in the lungs which can produce sensations of “doom, panic, drowning, and asphyxiation” according to Dr. Mark Edgar, a pathologist and autopsy director at the Mayo Clinic in Florida until his death earlier this year.
Mr. Black’s suffering was not unprecedented. In 2016, Dr. Edgar and Dr. Joel Zivot, then both at the Mayo Clinic, began examining autopsy reports of executed prisoners and noticed that many of the prisoners’ lungs were twice as heavy as they should have been. After gathering more records, they found pulmonary edema in approximately three-quarters of the people who had been executed. Their work led to a 2020 National Public Radio analysis of more than 200 autopsies of death-row prisoners executed using lethal injection (see HoC 21/09/2020). That study found that 84% showed evidence of pulmonary edema, a condition in which a person’s lungs fill with fluid, creating the feeling of suffocation or drowning that some experts have likened to waterboarding. Their findings were consistent irrespective of the state that carried out the execution or the drug protocol employed. Autopsy results showed the presence of pulmonary edema in lethal injections involving sodium thiopental, pentobarbital, midazolam, and etomidate.
Prior to Mr. Black’s execution, his attorneys flagged that a single-drug pentobarbital execution raised the risk that he would suffer from pulmonary edema in violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. But the state’s expert testified in hearings prior to his execution that Mr. Black would lose consciousness under the pentobarbital quickly — within 20 seconds. Witnesses to Mr. Black’s execution noted that he was still awake and a groaning in apparent pain five minutes after the start of the execution, saying “It’s hurting so bad.”
Even with the release of Mr. Black’s autopsy, his attorneys are still seeking additional information. Speaking to the Nashville Banner about questions still unanswered by the autopsy, attorneys for Mr. Black noted that the report “fails to document the condition of the veins … and to document the EKG results.” His attorneys are also concerned about the administration of the pentobarbital, including whether prison staff were able to locate a vein, or if they injected the drug into his muscle, something that would have created a wound at the injection site. Mr. Black’s team has filed freedom of information act requests of the Tennessee Department of Corrections which they expect to be answered by December.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/autopsy-points-to-reason-behind-byron-blacks-painful-execution-in-tennessee (Source: DPIC, 17/09/2025)
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