Legislators and prosecutors, however, tend to blame delays in implementing the death penalty on more specific causes, such as the failure of the state attorney general's office to push capital cases through the appeals system in the 1980s, the fact that the federal appeals circuit that includes Tennessee has had little experience with death penalty cases and the role of Senior U.S. District Court Judge John T. Nixon of Nashville. Nixon took charge of the pending death penalty appeals when inmates filed suit over conditions on death row at the old Tennessee State Penitentiary in 1984, and attorneys for the state accused him of moving slowly on those cases through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Three of those prisoners, all from Memphis, received new trials, resulting in life sentences for two and another death sentence for the third. A fourth death row inmate whose sentence was reversed by Nixon still awaits a new trial. Coe is the only one of the five whose conviction and sentence were reinstated by the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
Lawyers say that the court system is always prone to inertia unless someone pushes cases through it.
That's a special problem with death penalty cases, which often involve complex legal issues drawn out over years of appeals. That was not done during the late 1980s, while the late William M. Leech Jr. was state attorney general, said Rep. Frank Buck, D-Dowelltown, who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. All during the Leech era, nobody pushed it. Buck said the legislature has attempted to streamline the death penalty appeals process in the 1990s. Buck and other lawyers said that the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan, is not as accustomed to handling death penalty cases as the federal appeals courts farther to the south, where executions have become routine.