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A TRIPLE murderer has become the first killer to be executed with a defibrillator implant in his chest.
Byron Black, 69, groaned it was “hurting so bad” as he was given the lethal injection in Tennessee after a failed last-ditch bid to halt his execution.
Officials had refused to deactivate his implanted defibrillator despite fears it might continually try to restart his heart.
Black’s lawyer Kelley Henry had warned the execution could become a “grotesque spectacle” and he could still be in pain even if he looked unresponsive.
Black died at 10.43am on Tuesday – about 10 minutes after he was given the injection.
Asked for any last words, he replied, “No sir.”
But witnesses said he appeared to be in discomfort – sighing and breathing heavily and talking about being in pain.
Black looked around the room as the execution started – lifting his head off the gurney multiple times, and could be heard sighing and breathing heavily.
Throughout the execution, a spiritual adviser prayed and sang over Black – at one point touching his face.
As he lay with his hands and chest restrained with an IV line in his arm, he said: “Oh, it’s hurting so bad.”
The spiritual adviser responded: “I’m so sorry. Just listen to my voice.”
Black was jailed after he shot dead his girlfriend Angela Clay and her two daughters, aged six and nine, in 1988.
He killed the trio while he was on work release from serving time for shooting Clay’s estranged husband.
Linette Bell, whose sister and two nieces were killed, told local station WKRN-TV: “He didn’t have mercy on them, so why should we have mercy on him?”
She added: “His family is now going through the same thing we went through 37 years ago.
“I can’t say I’m sorry because we never got an apology.”
Black was executed after a back-and-forth over whether officials would need to turn off his implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD.
It was a battery-powered device designed to deliver electric shocks to restore a regular heartbeat if needed.
Black was in a wheelchair, suffering from dementia, brain damage, kidney failure, congestive heart failure and other conditions.
His lawyers said that a doctor should put a device over the implant to ensure it was switched off.
In July, a judge agreed it was necessary – but the state Supreme Court then said the judge lacked authority to order the defibrillator to be deactivated.
Black’s lawyer said the execution was shameful.
Henry said: “Today, the state of Tennessee killed a gentle, kind, fragile, intellectually disabled man in a violation of the laws of our country simply because they could.”
The lawyer added that they will review data kept by the heart device as part of an autopsy.
Prison officials have not commented on claims that Black appeared conscious or his complaints of pain.
It marked Tennessee’s second execution since May after a pause for five years – first because of the pandemic and then because of missteps by state corrections officials.
Twenty-eight men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in America – and nine other people are scheduled to be put to death in seven states during the remainder of 2025.
The number of executions this year exceeds the 25 carried out last year and in 2018.
It is the highest total since 2015, when 28 people were put to death.
What did Black’s lawyers say about his defibrillator?
BYRON Black had an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator – a small, battery-powered electronic device that is surgically implanted in the chest.
It served as a pacemaker and an emergency defibrillator.
Black’s attorneys said a doctor can send it a deactivation command without surgery.
The legal case also spurred a reminder that most medical professionals consider participation in executions a violation of health care ethics.
In recent years, Black’s legal team has unsuccessfully tried to get a new hearing about an intellectual disability they say he’s exhibited since childhood.
People with intellectual disabilities are constitutionally barred from execution.
His attorneys said that if they had delayed a prior attempt to seek his intellectual disability claim, he would have been spared under a 2021 state law.
That is because the 2021 law denies a hearing to people on death row who have already filed a similar request and a court has ruled on it “on the merits”.
A judge denied Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk’s attempt to get Black a new hearing.
Funk focused on input from an expert for the state in 2004 who determined back then that Black didnt meet the criteria for what was then called “mental retardation.
But she concluded that Black met the new laws criteria for a diagnosis of intellectual disability.
