State legislators convened the 109th General Assembly Tuesday and, in the Senate, the session began with an invocation and prayer led by Pastor Maury Davis.
You might know about Maury Davis. He is the senior pastor of the massive Cornerstone Church in Madison, a proud anti-Islamic antagonist, and the man who stabbed Jo Ella Liles to death in 1975.
That latter bit is detailed in Brantley Hargrove's 2009 Scene cover story. The murder was brutal — Davis, then 18, nearly beheaded Liles, a 54 year-old Sunday school teacher — and his guilt was never in question. But after claiming a jailhouse conversion and pursuing a defense that blamed his crime on insanity, drug abuse, and the devil himself, a jury found him guilty only of manslaughter, with a maximum sentence of 20 years.
After just eight-and-a-half years, though — during which Davis said he took to preaching to his fellow inmates — thanks to overcrowding and good behavior, Davis was released. A little more than 30 years later, he has cashed in on his redemption story — one which, as Hargrove lays out, has conveniently been edited and embellished to benefit the storyteller. Decades after nearly beheading a Sunday school teacher, he is a mega-church pastor who lives in a mansion and receives invitations to pray at the state legislature.
Some people — like the 3,000 to 4,000 who attend his church — believe in Maury Davis' sincerity. Many others think he is an appalling fraud.
So should we be surprised that he fit right in at the state legislature? After a glowing introduction from Rep. Bo Watson that made only passing reference to Davis' "sinful past" and "a time of incarceration," Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey welcomed him to the chamber saying "it's good to have you here as a man of God." The truth of Maury Davis' redemption was officially affirmed on the floor of the state Senate.
I wonder if they've ever heard of Olen Hutchison.
In December of 2013, Tennessee sought execution dates for 10 death row inmates, more at one time than it ever had before. Ramsey cheered them on. And every one was scheduled.
Olen Hutchison was among them, scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on May 12, 2015.
Hutchison was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death in 1991, for the murder of Hugh Huddleston — a murder that occurred while Hutchison was in another county. The story was explained in more detail by the Scene here, but the gist is this: Hutchison and six others were eventually arrested for conspiring to kill Huddleston, who was thrown off a pontoon boat in East Tennessee, to collect on his life insurance. Hutchison wasn't there, had no criminal history, and maintained that he had nothing to do with the plot. Even if he were completely guilty, the case garnered attention for its startling sentencing disparity. Hutchison — who, again, even in the prosecution's version of events did not physically commit the murder — was the only one who received the death penalty.
From the Scene's report in 2004:
Wilbur Hatmaker, the man who struck and pushed Huddleston from the boat, is eligible for parole in 2019. Another man who was on the boat with the victim, Johnny Rollyson, served six years and is now free. Ricky Miller lured Huddleston on the boat, and he’s now free.
In 2004, Hutchison was diagnosed with throat cancer and
in October, around 23 years after he arrived on death row, he died.
I spoke to Rev. Stacy Rector, the executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, several days after Hutchison's death. Rector had met Hutch, as he was known, during her time visiting another death row inmate and eventually began to visit him regularly. He was "well-liked" in the prison, she said, and "committed to self-improvement." During his time in prison he earned a bachelor's and a master's degree.
Rector said she had written Hutch a note, tell him she was proud of his dedication, and that he should be too. She pulled out the letter he sent back.
"I don't know how sufficiently proud I may be, but the ol' gray matter has had one hell of a workout," he wrote. "I don't know if dedication to my studies would be the right word. The biggest reason I got into my studies was because my son dropped out. I knew somewhere down the line, he would say 'well dad, you didn't go' end of story."
Maury Davis is a free man. So be it. But as the Senate showed Tuesday, he has more than his freedom. He has some of the most powerful men in the state affirming that he is not the man he was. That he has changed and that, despite what he did decades ago, it is good that he is alive now. What more could Olen Hutchison have done to earn such a distinction?
Death row is full of people who have committed heinous crimes But some people who have committed heinous crimes are not scheduled for execution. Some of them aren't even in prison. Olen Hutchison died on death row, and a few months later, Maury Davis helped ring in the 109th General Assembly. It's a peculiar thing, isn't it? And you'd think it might make the state's leaders more circumspect about condemning people to die.
But that might be the most unlikely conversion of all.
