Tennessee plans to kill Billy Ray Irick next month by lethal injection. If the execution goes through on August 9, a few weeks before his 60th birthday, he will be the seventh person put to death in the state since 2000, The Intercept reports. On death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, near Nashville, Irick has faced at least three previous execution dates, most recently in 2014. But there is an urgency this time, his longtime attorney, Gene Shiles, says. “This one feels much more ominous.” Irick was convicted in 1986 of raping and murdering a 7-year-old girl. He was arrested and confessed soon after the crime. Irick had stayed with the child’s family for two years before the murder. , according to court filings; defense attorneys “attempted to create reasonable doubt about the identity of the perpetrator” during the guilt phase of the trial, yet called “no witnesses.”
The Nashville Scene described Irick’s harrowing upbringing — as a child, he said his mother tied him with a rope and beat him — along with compelling evidence that he suffered from severe mental illness. A picture of Irick’s profound mental problems did not come out until years after his conviction, Shiles explains, when an investigator working for his attorneys went to Knoxville and “discovered some hugely important facts that came from the victim’s family — that he was hallucinating and having psychotic episodes at the time that this occurred.” In affidavits, members of the family described Irick “hearing voices” and “talking with the devil.” The jury never heard this evidence. If they had, there’s reason to believe that the outcome of the case could have been different. As Hale writes, the same psychologist who examined Irick before his trial “stated in an affidavit that he no longer had confidence in his initial evaluation, which had been used to argue against an insanity defense.”