'Tell the governor we pray for him:' Group delivers petitions against executions

Tennessee faith leaders — along with a former death row inmate who was exonerated — delivered on Tuesday to Gov. Bill Haslam petitions with more than 62,000 signatures urging him to intervene in the scheduled execution of Billy Ray Irick.

Irick, 59, is scheduled to be executed Thursday evening for the 1986 rape and murder of 7-year-old Paula Dyer. He has exhausted appeals on his original case.

More:Death row inmate Billy Ray Irick moved to death watch ahead of Thursday execution date

"Tell the governor we pray for him, and we'll continue to pray for a change in his position," said the Rev. Stacy Rector, executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty as she handed off the box of signatures to Don Johnson, Haslam's director of constituent services.

Prior to delivering the petition signatures at the entrance to the Capitol, the group affiliated with TADP spoke at Legislative Plaza about the need for the state to reverse its position on execution.

"In the nine years since Tennessee's last execution, the number of people exonerated and released from death row across the nation is 162," Rector said.

"The system we have simply isn't capable of ensuring we get it right 100 percent of the time, and it has to be."

Ray Krone, now a Tennessee native, spoke about his own experience as a defendant wrongfully convicted of a 1991 murder in Phoenix, Arizona.

After being sentenced to death and serving more than 10 years in prison, Krone was exonerated in 2002.

"If they can put me on death row, they can put anybody on death row," said Krone, who had no criminal record prior to being charged in the case, had been honorably discharged from the military and had worked for the United States Postal Service for seven years.

"It's not for the worst of the worst," Krone said. "It's for the weakest and the poorest."

At age 45, he was the 100th death row inmate to be found not guilty and freed since the United States reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

Others, such as Jimmie Garland, a vice president of Tennessee NAACP, and James Booth, director of Prison Ministry for the Catholic Diocese of Nashville, spoke on how, despite their sympathy for and solidarity with murder victims' families, their organizations continue to speak out against the death penalty.

Charles Strobel, founding director of Room in the Inn homeless shelter, shared how his family asked "that the killer of our mother not be sentenced to death."

His mother, Mary Catherine Strobel, was killed in Nashville in 1986.

More:Supreme Court denies stay of execution for Billy Ray Irick, Haslam will not intervene

The petition delivered to Haslam was started by Paul House, a former Tennessee death row inmate released in 2007. While spending 22 years in prison, he developed multiple sclerosis, and now uses a wheelchair and cared for by his mother. It urges Haslam not to resume any executions in Tennessee.

Reach Natalie Allison at nallison@tennessean.com. Follow her on Twitter at @natalie_allison.