What is happening with Pervis Payne?

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Pervis Payne has spent 33 years facing execution because he stumbled upon what he described in court as “the worst thing I ever saw in my life” — a woman and two children who had been attacked. Despite having no prior criminal record and living with an intellectual disability, he was convicted and sentenced to death in Tennessee for murdering the woman and her daughter. 

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Mr. Payne has always maintained his innocence and in November 2020, Governor Bill Lee granted Mr. Payne a temporary reprieve of execution. The reprieve is set to expire on April 9, 2021, which means Mr. Payne’s life is still at risk. Though it’s unconstitutional to execute someone with an intellectual disability, Tennessee currently has no mechanism for Mr. Payne to present his intellectual disability claim. 

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He is a Black man with an intellectual disability who was accused of murdering a white woman in a county with a long history of racial violence. The prosecution played to this history, invoking racist themes at trial and withheld exculpatory evidence.  The State is also unable to account for missing pieces of key evidence that could help prove his innocence. 

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On June 27, 1987, Mr. Payne was waiting for his girlfriend at her apartment in Millington, Tennessee, when he saw a man with blood on him sprinting out of the building. The man ran past him, dropping change and papers as he ran, a few of which Mr. Payne picked up before he entered the building and made his way to his girlfriend’s apartment. There, he noticed that the door to the apartment across the hall was open and heard a noise. 

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Payne entered the neighbor’s apartment where he encountered Charisse Christopher, who had been stabbed 41 times and still had a knife in her throat. 

The panicked 20-year-old tried to help. He noticed that Ms. Christopher’s hand was grasping at the knife, and removed it. Then he checked on her two young children before running to get help. Shortly after leaving the apartment, he saw police officers arriving. And for the second time that day, Payne was overcome with panic. “Some other feeling just went all over me and just panicked, just like, oh, look at this,” Mr. Payne said in his testimony. “I’m coming out of here with blood on me and everything. It going to look like I done this crime.” Mr. Payne was arrested later that day — the first misstep in the path that led to his wrongful conviction for the murder of Ms. Christopher and her 2-year-old daughter. 

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Mr. Payne grew up in Tipton County, Tennessee — once the third-largest cotton-producing county in the state — with parents who were both descendants of sharecropping families in the Jim Crow South. He is a loving son and brother and shared a tight bond with his sisters for whom he was always a source of fun and entertainment. Mr. Payne lives with an intellectual disability and struggled in school. Though he tried, he continued to have difficulty with reading, spelling, and math, even after being placed in resource classes. Despite his best efforts, Mr. Payne was unable to graduate. Growing up he also had trouble with everyday tasks like cooking and doing laundry — as a child, he needed help feeding himself until he was 5. Doctors have since confirmed through testing that Mr. Payne has an intellectual disability. Under the 8th Amendment, it would be unconstitutional to execute him. 

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Mr. Payne was wrongly convicted in February 1988, but until recently, no evidence in his case had been tested for DNA. On Jan. 19, DNA testing of crime scene evidence yielded results that were “consistent with Mr. Payne’s long-standing claim of innocence,” according to his legal team. “Male DNA from an unknown third party was found on key evidence including the murder weapon, but unfortunately, is too degraded to identify an alternate suspect via the FBI’s database.” However, by the time a judge ordered DNA testing in Mr. Payne’s case last year, key pieces of evidence had gone missing — a troubling development. The State is still unable to find any of the evidence most likely to have sufficient DNA from the attacker, including the victim’s fingernail scrapings.

 

All information via: the innocence project 

https://innocenceproject.org/pervis-payne-tennessee-death-row-dna-innocence/ 

 

What can we do? 

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https://innocenceproject.org/petitions/stop-execution-pervis-payne/?p2asource=history_07222020 

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