A Tennessee death row inmate scheduled to be executed in December will now live into 2027, after Governor Bill Lee paused the state’s remaining executions following a problem-plagued lethal injection last week.
Gary Wayne Sutton, convicted in the 1992 murders of siblings Tommy Griffin and Connie Branam, had been set for execution on December 3. That date is no longer in effect after Lee halted all executions planned through the end of the year, a decision that came after death row inmate Christa Pike survived two rounds of lethal injection drugs during her own execution last week.
Sutton has not been given a new execution date, and state officials have not said when Tennessee will resume carrying out death sentences. Only one other execution had been scheduled for the remainder of 2026.
The 1992 killings
According to court records, Sutton’s case dates back to a night of drinking on February 21, 1992, that ended in violence. Sutton, his uncle James Dellinger, and Tommy Griffin got into a fight. Griffin was later found shirtless and scratched up along a roadside, where police picked him up and arrested him on a public-intoxication charge.
Sutton and Dellinger bailed Griffin out of jail. About half an hour later, witnesses reported hearing three gunshots near where Griffin’s body was eventually found, killed by a shotgun blast to the head.
The next day, Griffin’s sister, Connie Branam, went with Sutton and Dellinger to search for her brother at a bar the group had visited the night before. Prosecutors said her badly burned body was later found inside a scorched car.
Dellinger was also sentenced to death for the killings but died of natural causes while still on death row, before his sentence could be carried out.
What comes next
It is not yet clear how long Tennessee’s pause on executions will last or when a new date might be set for Sutton. The delay is a direct consequence of the complications that arose during Pike’s execution, which prompted Governor Lee to halt the remaining cases on the state’s 2026 execution calendar.
