After nearly 20 years on death row, William Stevens died Monday at the age of 60. He was pronounced dead at 1:57 a.m. on April 4, 2016, at a Nashville hospital of natural causes, according to a release from the Tennessee Department of Corrections. He was an inmate at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison here in Nashville.
Stevens was convicted of especially aggravated robbery and two counts of first degree murder for the 1997 deaths of his wife, 45-year-old Sandra Jean Stevens, and her mother, 75-year-old Myrtle Wilson. Stevens was found guilty of hiring 18-year-old Corey Milliken to murder the two women and stage a burglary at their home. He was sentenced to death in 1999. Milliken is serving a life sentence.
In 2002, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld Stevens' death sentence, although one justice offered a dissenting opinion.
From the court's release at the time:
In a separate concurring and dissenting opinion, Justice Adolpho A. Birch, Jr., said he has “grave concerns” about the procedure used by the court to determine whether the death sentence is excessive or disproportionate to penalties imposed in similar cases. Birch cited previous opinions in which he said the comparative proportionality review protocol does not fulfill statutory requirements.“Because I have not detected any meaningful effort to address and rectify my concerns, I respectfully dissent from the imposition of the penalty of death in this case,” he wrote.
In the majority opinion, [Justice William M.] Barker said the court identified and reviewed cases “involving circumstances similar to the crime in this case” and concluded that the death sentence was not disproportionate or arbitrarily applied.
Stevens is the first death row inmate to die since
Donald Strouth died of natural causes— after nearly 40 years on death row — in May of last year.
Tennessee has not executed anyone since 2009. The state set execution dates for 10 men in early 2014, but in April 2015 all executions were put on hold. After Stevens' death Monday, 65 men and one woman remain on death row.
