The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday put on hold Tennessee’s plans to carry out an execution just hours after it put an inmate to death for only the second time in more than 45 years.
The court denied a request from the state attorney general to allow the execution of convicted murderer Paul Dennis Reid. His execution had been delayed by a federal judge who said a hearing was needed to determine whether the inmate was mentally competent to give up appeals of his seven death sentences.
Under state court rules, the Tennessee Supreme Court has to set a new execution date if Reid is not executed by midnight. In most cases, it takes weeks or months.
Reid, 48, was convicted of murdering seven people at three Tennessee restaurants in 1997 after he was fired from his job as a dishwasher at Shoney’s.
In the state’s earlier execution Wednesday, Sedley Alley, 50, confessed to killing 19-year-old Marine Suzanne Collins in 1985 while she jogged near a Navy base north of Memphis.
Alley claimed at trial that he was not responsible for the murder because he had multiple personalities. But in 2004, he recanted his confession, argued he was innocent and said DNA testing could prove it.
On Tuesday, Texas put to death Angel Maturino Resendiz, known as the Railroad Killer. Claudia Benton, 39, was stabbed, bludgeoned and raped in her Houston home in 1998. Her slaying came during a deadly spree in 1998 and 1999 that earned Resendiz a spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted list as authorities searched for a murderer who slipped across the U.S. border and roamed the country by freight train.
