BLOUNT COUNTY, Tenn. — An advocacy group gathered in Knoxville and Blount County Friday to call for state leaders to re-examine the death row sentence of an East Tennessee man decades later.
Gary Wayne Sutton was accused of killing two Sevier County siblings in February 1992 along with his uncle, James Dellinger. While his uncle died in prison, Gary is still on death row after state leaders paused executions following the discovery of an "oversight" moments before a separate prisoner was set to be executed in April 2022.
The advocacy group "Justice for Gary Wayne Sutton" said evidence that convicted him was faulty and his attorneys did not represent him correctly. Gary was convicted after prosecutors argued he and Dellinger killed Tommy Griffin and Connie Branam. They said Griffin was arrested after he, Dellinger and Gary all got drunk together.
They said Dellinger and Gary bailed Griffin out of jail later that night, and Griffin was never seen alive again. They said after his sister went looking for him, she was also shot and killed.
The advocacy group said it wants Governor Bill Lee to take a second look at his conviction.
Jim Sutton, Gary Sutton's 93-year-old father, attended a protest at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, in Knoxville. He said his son didn't kill Griffin nor Branam, and it's been hard to see Gary on death row.
"It hurt me, boy, you better believe it," Jim Sutton said. "Gary would never do nothing like that. No, no, he never did nothing like that."
News reports from the early 1990s in The Mountain Press, Sevier County's newspaper, said Griffin went missing one night, and his sister, Branam, went looking for him.
Griffin's body was found along The Little River in Walland. He'd been shot. Investigators found Branam's body a few days later, in Sevier County. She'd also been shot, and her car had been burned. Griffin's trailer, located in Sevier County, had also been burned to the ground.
Carolyn Miller said she was in a relationship with Sutton when the siblings went missing and throughout his trials. They lost touch for more than 20 years, but then she saw a news report about Sutton, which inspired her to get back in contact with him. She's leading the charge to get Sutton's case re-examined.
"I know how close him and Tommy was, I know how he loved Tommy and he protected Tommy at all causes he could," Miller said. "I'm just begging you, Governor Lee, all we are asking is to just sit down and look at Gary's case. We're not asking you to go against anything you don't believe in. But as you sit down and look at Gary's case, you're going to wonder how this ever happened."
Heather Cohen, a private investigator, and Jeff Hood, a well-known spiritual advisor, spoke at the event. Cohen said she's looked into Sutton's case and found problems with evidence presented during trial, talked to a witness who recanted their testimony and said that the medical examiner who testified in the case was stripped of his medical license later on.
"It is the worst case of injustice that I've ever seen," Cohen said. "Gary represents everything wrong with the justice system. It is an example of what happens when the integrity of the investigation is not upheld."
Hood is a pastor and spiritual advisor to a number of high-profile death row inmates, including Kenneth Smith, an Alabama who was executed earlier this year. Smith was the first person to be executed with nitrogen hypoxia in the United States.
Hood said he's seen Cohen's investigation into Sutton's case, and he also believes that Sutton should be exonerated and the justice system failed him.
"We also know this is a circumstance in which a motive was manufactured. Tommy Griffin was Gary's best friend, he had no reason to kill him," Hood said. "But as a Southerner, having lived all over the South, in some of these backwoods places I lived and loved, there is a rush to judgment because people were afraid. And in this situation, there's no doubt that took place."
Branam's daughter, Sandy Branam, told 10News that even though it's been decades, it feels like mother and uncle were just killed yesterday. She said Tommy Griffin and Connie Branam were good people, and that she thinks the right people have been punished for killing them.
"She was a good person, I'd love to go camping with her," Sandy said of her mother. "We'd go hiking, we'd do things like that. She was a family person we'd have cookouts all the time together."
She said she thinks Gary and Dellinger are responsible for their deaths.
"Even though it's been 30-something years, it's still hard to deal with it," Sandy said. "To me, I wish they did life without parole, so we don't have to sit here and go through this every so often. Back then we wanted the death sentence because of what they done. And now we still have to live with it."