In early August, on the one-year anniversary of his father’s death, Samson Childs invited his godfather out to eat at a Wingstop on Nashville’s south side, not far from where his dad grew up. Hanging out with his godfather was a way for Childs to feel close to his father, Byron Black, who died at 69. “We talked and we cried and he gave me good memories – just old stories of my dad, him growing up, and how they stuck together,” Childs said.
Black spent more than three decades on death row before he was killed by lethal injection on August 5, 2025, at Tennessee’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. He’d been convicted in 1989 for killing his girlfriend, Angela Clay, along with her two young daughters. Black insisted he did not commit the horrific murders, but was swiftly found guilty and sentenced to die.
Over the decades that followed, Black’s lawyers argued that his intellectual disability should have barred him from facing the death penalty. The DA’s office that convicted him even conceded that they were right, but the courts disagreed. By the time Tennessee prepared to kill him, Black had been diagnosed with dementia, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure.
“How would I feel knowing that this is my last day on earth?”
