NASHVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW) – Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has granted death row inmate Edmund Zagorski a 10 day reprieve from execution as a legal battle continues.
Haslam made the following statement Thursday afternoon:
“I am granting to Edmund Zagorski a reprieve of 10 days from execution of the sentence of death imposed upon by him by a jury in 1984 which was scheduled to be carried out later today. I take seriously the responsibility imposed upon the Tennessee Department of Correction and me by law, and given the federal court’s decision to honor Zagorski’s last-minute decision to choose electrocution as the method of execution, this brief reprieve will give all involved the time necessary to carry out the sentence in an orderly and careful manner.”
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the state of Tennessee not to proceed with plans to execute Edmund Zagorski by lethal injection after it refused his request to die in the electric chair.
U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger granted a motion by Zagorski’s attorneys not to execute Zagorski by lethal injection.
Zagorski had asked to be executed by electrocution because he said the three-drug cocktail the state used constituted cruel and unusual punishment and violated his constitutional rights.
However, the state denied that request, arguing Zagorski waited too long to ask for the electric chair. Trauger disagreed with the state.
“There are serious questions in this case concerning whether the lethal injection protocol with which the state intends to execute the plaintiff is more or less humane than electrocution, which is his preferred method and which was the statutory method of execution at the time he was sentenced and still seems to be available to him as a matter of state law,” Trauger wrote.
Tennessee is one of only nine states that allow electrocutions. The last electrocution in the U.S. took place in Virginia in January 2013.
Trauger’s decision is the latest development in the multiple legal challenges surrounding the Tennessee death row inmate whose scheduled Thursday evening execution has been temporarily halted by a separate court order. In total, three separate legal challenging are circling Zagorski’s execution — creating a day of legal chaos in the buildup to the pending execution.
*The Associated Press contributed to this report.