NASHVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW) – A majority of the Tennessee Supreme Court has denied death row inmate, Billy Ray Irick, a stay of execution pending the resolution of his appeal of an unsuccessful challenge to the State’s lethal injection protocol.

Irick is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, August 9, 2018.

He was sentenced to death following his 1986 convictions for the rape and murder of a seven-year-old child. Following Irick’s appellate review, the Tennessee Supreme Court set his execution date for December 7, 2010. However, he was granted a stay based upon his claim that he was mentally incompetent to be executed. The Court rescheduled his execution for October 7, 2014, after a trial court determined he was competent.

His execution again was stayed following a lawsuit claiming that the Tennessee Department of Correction’s single-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital was unconstitutional. On March 28, 2017, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the single-drug protocol as constitutional. In January 2018, after the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case involving the one-drug protocol, the Tennessee Supreme Court again rescheduled Irick’s execution, this time for August 9, 2018.

Around this same time in January 2018, TDOC adopted a three-drug lethal injection protocol as an alternative method of execution. In February 2018, Irick and thirty-two other death row inmates filed a constitutional challenge to this three-drug protocol. While the inmates’ case was pending, TDOC eliminated the single-drug lethal injection alternative, rendering the three-drug protocol as the only available lethal injection execution method in Tennessee.

On July 26, 2018, the chancery court in Davidson County dismissed the inmates’ complaint, and the plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal on July 30, 2018. Also on July 30, 2018, Irick filed a motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court to vacate the Court’s order setting his August 9, 2018 execution date.

In its order filed August 6, 2018, a majority of the Court denied Irick’s Motion to Vacate Execution Date.