Death penalty foes urge DNA tests
If Pervis Payne is executed on Dec. 3, it will be a modern-day lynching, legal, faith and community leaders said Monday.
“Our district attorney is demonstrating callous disregard for Mr. Payne’s diminishing rights, life and hopes,” said Bishop David Hall, prelate of the Tennessee Headquarters Jurisdiction of the Church of God in Christ. “The state can afford to review both Pervis Payne’s case and his mental disabilities. His former court proceedings were filled with supercharged racial bias and dog-whistle language. Give Pervis Payne the last measure of human dignity, a reprieve, and spare his life.”
A coalition spearheaded by the Ben F. Jones Chapter of the National Bar Association gathered Monday to urge District Attorney General Amy Weirich to support DNA testing of more than a dozen items of evidence in the death penalty case of Pervis Tyrone Payne.
Payne, a Black man convicted of killing a white woman and her child, is scheduled to be put to death on Dec. 3.
The group blasted the district attorney’s office for its handling of the case, and several also called on Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute Payne’s death sentence.
A judge will hear arguments regard
ing the DNA testing Tuesday morning.
Payne was at the crime scene but maintained innocence
Payne was convicted in the 1987 stabbing deaths of Millington woman Charisse Christopher, 28, and her 2-yearold daughter, Lacie. Christopher’s 3-year-old son, Nicholas, survived multiple stab wounds.
During his 1988 trial, Payne said he discovered the gruesome crime scene after hearing calls for help through the open door of the apartment.
He said he bent down to try to help, getting blood on his clothes and pulling at the knife still lodged in Christopher’s throat. When a white police officer arrived, Payne, who is Black, said he panicked and ran, fearing he would be seen as the prime suspect.
Payne has intellectual disabilities and had no prior criminal history, according to his attorneys.
Advocates urge new look at death penalty
On Monday, multiple people gathered to support Payne’s case compared his death sentence to the lynchings of Black men throughout American history. Some compared it to the recent killings of Black men and women by law enforcement.
“George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery did not get a hearing,” Hall said. “This list of names asserts that the American judicial system is estranged from principle and has lost the intrinsic quality of justice for all. In closing, there has never been a lynching in America that police and judicial authorities did not approve of in some respect.”
The coalition included a strong presence from the Church of God in Christ, of which Payne is a member. Several of Payne’s family members attended the news conference, including his father, an elder in a COGIC church in Millington.
The coalition launched after the Ben F. Jones Chapter’s legal task force decided to tackle Payne’s case amid national protests over the death of George Floyd “and the realization that maybe, finally, we might have a sympathetic ear for change,” said attorney Latrena Ingram, co-chair of the Ben F. Jones Chapter of the National Bar Association’s legal justice task force. The coalition includes the Memphis Bar Association, 100 Black Men of Memphis Inc., the National Council of Negro Women (Memphis Chapter), Stand for Children Tennessee, Just City and the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators.
Attorneys for Payne have said prosecutors at his trial relied on racist stereotypes to seek a conviction, painting a picture of him as a hypersexual Black man, addicted to drugs and who preyed on a white woman. The prosecution made repeated references to the victim’s “white skin” in front of the jury, Payne’s advocates have said.
Weirich has asked the court to deny the request for DNA testing. In a July news conference, she said that “newly discovered evidence” was not actually new at all, but had been given to Payne’s attorneys by mistake and was actually from an entirely different homicide.
Any information garnered from testing that and the other items requested “would not exonerate Pervis Payne,” Weirich said.
“If the testing is allowed and someone else’s DNA is found on the evidence, Payne would still be prosecuted by our office for these horrific murders,” Weirich said in a statement Monday. “To say otherwise would require me to ignore the overwhelming evidence proving his guilt. DNA testing does not give us a date stamp. DNA evidence was not used to convict him. Testing the evidence and finding someone else’s DNA would only establish that someone else touched the item at some point in time. It would not prove that Payne didn’t kill a mother and her daughter and leave a young boy for dead.”
In the state’s response to the request for DNA testing, it wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court had described there being “overwhelming and relatively uncontroverted evidence against (Payne).”
In their reply brief, Payne’s attorneys write that the DNA testing could take place within 60 days, well before his scheduled execution date.
They also wrote that the law in Tennessee has changed since Payne last brought a request for DNA testing. Today, the Tennessee Supreme Court has said courts “must presume that the results of DNA testing will favor petitioners like Mr. Payne in determining whether post-conviction test results would be material to innocence in a given case,” they wrote.
If male DNA that did not match Payne were found on the knife, tampon, fingernail scrapings or other evidence and were matched to a profile in the FBI CODIS database, it “would be compelling evidence of Mr. Payne’s innocence,” his attorneys wrote.
NAACP, Memphis legislators among those urging tests
Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner, president of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP, said the NAACP and people in Memphis have a history of fighting against injustices.
“What does the district attorney’s office have to hide? All we’re asking is for DNA to be tested,” Turner said. “If this is a fair conviction, if your guys got it right, if you have nothing to hide, then give us the DNA test. When you resist a DNA test, we know something wrong has occurred. … If you’re trying to hide something, something bad has gone down.”
In Monday’s news conference, state Rep. G.A. Hardaway, D-memphis, said the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators will ask the governor to commute Payne’s sentence and also plans to file legislation related to death penalty cases. Already, an ad hoc committee led by Rep. Barbara Cooper, Dmemphis, and Sen. Raumesh Akbari, D-memphis, are authoring the legislation, he said.
“There’s nothing different here than what we’re seeing laid out every day where Black men, where those who are at the lower end of the socio-economic scale are victims all too often of the terrors of errors in the injustice system. Our job is to cure that deficit,” Hardaway said. “It’s the same lack of due process that allowed institutional lynching.”
Katherine Burgess covers county government, religion and the suburbs. Reach her at katherine.burgess@commercial appeal.com, 901-5292799 or followed on Twitter @kathsburgess.