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- [S124] Brown Funeral Home, Newport, Tennessee, (http://www.newportfunerals.com), 3 Feb 1977.
Anderson Moffitt Sutton obituary
- [S24] The Newport Plain Talk, (http://www.newportplaintalk.com), 9 Feb 2014.
Supreme court sets 2015 execution date for Sutton
By GILBERT SOESBEE
Without extensive comment, the Tennessee Supreme Court has set November 17, 2015, as the execution date for 49-year- old convicted multiple murderer Nicholas Todd “Nicky” Sutton.
No Death Row inmate has been executed in Tennessee since 2009.
Sutton has been on Tennessee’s Death Row since 1980 and has twice been convicted of capital murder. The first death sentence came in connection with the death of Knoxville contractor Charles P. Almon III, 46, in late September or early October 1979. Investigators allege that Almon’s body was wrapped in a sheet, chained to a concrete block, then thrown into the once-state- owned rock quarry off Golf Course Road in Cocke County.
The defendant was sentenced to death by electrocution in connection with Almon’s killing, but the method was changed to lethal injection when Tennessee’s law changed to require lethal injection as Tennessee’s sole method of execution.
Sutton was sentenced
to life in prison in connection with the 1979 killing of his grandmother, whom prosecutors told jurors was murdered after learning that Sutton had killed at least twice before.
Fifty-eight-year-old Dorothy Sutton, of Morristown, was severely beaten, then wrapped in a sheet before being thrown into a stream in 1979, reportedly dying of drowning.
The most recent capital crime for which Sutton was convicted, and the case for which the defendant is now scheduled to die by lethal injection in 21 months, is the mutilation and stabbing death of Carl Estep, a fellow inmate at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, on January 15, 1985.
An inmate who testified during Sutton’s trial said Estep was dealing marijuana in the prison and had sold the defendant some “bad merchandise.” He testified that he witnessed the murder by Sutton and another inmate.
A retired prison guard who went to the stabbing scene after Estep’s murder stated that it looked like Sutton had tried to cut the man’s heart out of his chest.
The jury panel which sentenced Sutton to death found there were no mitigating circumstances sufficient to outweigh three aggravating circumstances, as defined by state law at the time of the conviction. The aggravating circumstances jurors found were that Sutton had a prior conviction of a violent felony; the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel; and the crime was committed while Sutton was in a place of lawful confinement.
Sutton is one of ten state Death Row inmates who were named in a formal request from Governor Bill Haslam, against whom the governor asked the state’s highest court last December to set execution dates.
The execution date for Sutton is the first which has been set by the state supreme court since Governor Haslam made his request last October 13. Among the defendants named in those cases is Jonathan Wesley Stephenson, of Talbot, who is awaiting execution in connection with the 1989 shooting death of his wife, Lisa Gail Stephenson, in Cocke County. Stephenson is still actively appealing his conviction.
Sutton raised nine issues in his post-conviction appeal, all of which were rejected by the supreme court. On Sutton’s direct appeal, the high court affirmed Sutton’s conviction and sentence in 1988. The trial court and Court of Criminal Appeals later denied his post-conviction appeal.
In the court’s unanimous order, the supreme court ruled that “Mr. Sutton has presented no legal basis for denying the state’s motion to set [an] execution date….Therefore, the state’s motion is granted.
“It is hereby ordered… by this court that the warden of the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, or his designee, shall execute the sentence of death as provided by law on the seventeenth day of November 2015, unless otherwise directed by this court or other appropriate authority,” according to the court order.
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, d. 3 Feb 1977 (Age 35 years)