Tennessee EXECUTES BLIND MAN after 28 years on Death row- Sets girl friend on F!re-He Begs for Mercy

Tennessee EXECUTES BLIND MAN after 28 years on Death row- Sets girl friend on F!re-He Begs for Mercy

New at 11, a blind prisoner convicted of killing his estranged girlfriend by setting her on fire in her car was executed tonight in Tennessee’s electric chair. 53-year-old Lee Hall was pronounced dead just after 7:30 Central Time at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville. Court documents state Hall killed 22-year-old Tracy Crozier April 17th, 1991, by setting her car on fire with a container of gasoline that he lit and tossed inside. Before being executed, Hall said people need to learn forgiveness and love, and he said make this world a better place.

On December 5th, 2019, after spending more than 28 years on death row, Lee Hall was executed by electric chair at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 53 years old. In this video, we are going to walk you through everything that happened. His last words, his last meal, and the full story of how he ended up in that execution chamber. But to understand any of it, we have to go back to April of 1991 when a young woman made the decision to leave a relationship that was hurting her. And a man decided he was not going to let her go.

A woman who simply wanted to move on with her life. A man who could not accept that she had the right to. And a night that started with a jug of gasoline and ended with a 22-year-old burning in the street. Conscious, in pain, still able to say the name of the man who had done it. This is the complete story of Lee Hall and Tracy Crozier. From where they both came from to the night their lives collided in the worst possible way, to the 28 years of courtrooms and appeals that followed, and finally to the night Tennessee put Lee Hall to death. If you want to keep up with cases like this one, make sure you subscribe to No Way Out.

Now, let’s go back to where it all started. Leroy Hall Jr. was born on October 28th, 1966, in Tennessee. From the time he was very young, his family never stayed in one place. They moved from city to city, from house to house, never settling long enough for any place to feel like home. Before Leroy could make a single lasting friend, the family was already packing up and leaving again. He grew up without roots, without stability, and without anyone around him who seemed to notice that something was going wrong.

School was hard for him from the start. He repeated the sixth grade in the 1978 to 1979 school year. He repeated the ninth grade in 1981 to 1982. He repeated the 11th grade in 1983 to 1984. Every time he failed a grade, he found himself surrounded by younger students, while the people his own age moved on without him. He attended summer school regularly. He fell further behind every year, and no teacher, no counselor, and no adult in his life stepped in to figure out why.

The people around Leroy never gave him what he needed. No one stepped in to address what was clearly going wrong. Mental health professionals who examined him later found serious personality disorders that had been building since childhood. Conditions that left him unable to handle frustration, disappointment, or rejection. When those feelings hit him, they came out in destructive ways. Fire was one of those ways. When the pain inside him got too heavy, he set things on fire. It was not a one-time thing. It became a habit he kept returning to. By 1990 and into 1991, he had set fire to property on four or five separate occasions. Nobody around him treated it as the warning sign it was.

Alcohol entered his life in his teenage years and never left. He did not drink occasionally. He drank heavily, and when he was drunk, whatever self-control he had when sober was completely gone. Crack cocaine came into his life by the time he was a young adult and became part of his daily routine. Between the alcohol and the cocaine, his ability to think clearly was regularly compromised. By the early 1980s, he was attending high school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Behind his classmates, repeating grades, attending summer sessions, with no close friends, and no one looking out for him.

He was 18 years old in December of 1984 when he met someone for the first time who changed everything. Her name was Tracy Latrice Crozier and she was born on September 1st, 1968, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She grew up in a home that was the opposite of Leroy Hall’s in almost every way. Her father, Gene Crozier, was a loving and present parent who made both of his daughters feel valued and seen every single day. Her sister, Stacy, was her closest companion. Not just a sibling, but a genuine friend. The Crozier home was warm, connected, and stable, and Tracy was at the heart of it.

Everyone who knew Tracy described her the same way. Her best friend, Heather Lewis, called her the sweetest, most caring person she had ever known. Someone who would help anyone at any time without being asked. Her father called her a free spirit. He said she never missed a day of class. These were not descriptions people invented after something terrible happened to make a victim seem more likable. They were the honest words of people who had known her well, and they were consistent across everyone who had spent any real time with her.

Tracy was comfortable in the world. She was sociable, easy to be around, and genuinely interested in the people in her life. She laughed easily. She made others feel at ease. She had her own plans, her own interests, her own connections that she maintained with real care. She was not someone who drifted through her days without direction. She was engaged and present and alive in the way that people are when they genuinely enjoy being alive.

In December of 1984, when Tracy was 16 years old, she and Leroy Hall crossed paths for the first time. They were young people in the same city, and their lives intersected. The relationship did not become formal right away. For about a year, they simply knew each other, spending time together without any official commitment between them. Then in January of 1986, they began dating seriously, and within that same month, they moved in together. Tracy was 17 years old when she moved into a shared home with Leroy. They were both young.

For Leroy, the relationship was the most important thing in his world. She was the first stable, caring presence he had found in a life that had contained very little of either quality. His attachment to her was immediate and total. He put everything he had into the connection from the first moment. For Tracy, the relationship was something she entered honestly and tried to make work.

The early years of living together were not marked by dramatic trouble. They shared a home, built a routine, and got on with daily life. Tracy continued to be the person she had always been: warm, connected to her family, present with the people around her. But the problems underneath the surface never went away. Leroy’s emotional issues, his dependency on Tracy, his volatility when drinking, none of that changed because he was in a relationship. Those qualities were built into who he was, and a shared apartment and daily routine could not undo them. Over time, they began to show.

Stacy Wooten, Tracy’s sister, watched the relationship from the outside and saw what was happening. Tracy stayed for 5 years. That is not an unusual outcome. Leaving a relationship that has become abusive is never simple. She had invested 5 years of her life. She had cared about Leroy, or had cared about the person she had believed he could become. Walking away from all of that required a kind of strength and clarity that takes time to arrive.

By March of 1991, it arrived. On March 26, 1991, Tracy packed her belongings and left the home she had shared with Leroy Hall. She moved into the house of her grandmother, Gloria Mathis, and her uncle, Chris Mathis. It was the right move. Family who loved her, people who knew the situation, a safe and stable place to start again. She was 22 years old, and she was done. For the first time in 5 years, she was not living under the weight of the relationship she had left. She was 22 years old, and she was starting over. And the house on the Mathis property was the foundation she was building from.

Leroy Hall did not accept what she had done. Within days of her leaving, the phone calls started. He called the Mathis house repeatedly, often late at night when the household should have been asleep. He wanted to reach Tracy. He wanted her to come back. He wanted to explain, to argue, to push until she changed her mind. Chris Mathis answered the phone on multiple occasions and told him clearly to stop calling and leave Tracy alone. Hall heard the message and called again. This was the same pattern that had defined the difficult years of the relationship. The same inability to accept boundaries. The same refusal to treat Tracy’s decisions as hers to make. The physical distance between them had changed. The dynamic had not. Tracy was no longer living with him, but he was still present in her daily life through the phone calls and through the anxiety that came with knowing he was not going to let go.

Three weeks passed between March 26th and April 6th, 1991. Three weeks of late-night calls and persistent pressure. Tracy went about her life and tried to move forward, and the man she had left kept interrupting that effort. Then, everything changed in nature. In the early morning hours of April 6th, 1991, the Mathis household was woken by a dog barking. Chris Mathis went to the window and looked outside. Tracy’s car, a two-door Nissan Pulsar, was burning in the street. Standing near the burning vehicle was Leroy Hall. When Hall saw Chris, he ran. Chris stepped outside and fired a gunshot into the air to drive him off. The fire department arrived and put out the fire. Arson investigator Ed Forrester examined the scene and found evidence that an accelerant had been poured around the edges of the vehicle. A yellow plastic jug found nearby tested positive for gasoline. Based on the physical evidence and Chris Mathis’ account of what he had seen, Forrester applied for an arrest warrant for Hall.

Hall called the Mathis house after the fire. Chris answered. He told Hall directly, “Leave Tracy alone or there will be consequences.” Hall’s response came without hesitation. He said, “If I can’t have her, nobody can’t.” Those words were not the words of someone who was simply struggling with heartbreak. They were the words of a man who believed that Tracy’s life without him was not something she had the right to have. He was not expressing sadness. He was stating a position. The arrest warrant for the April 6th arson was in process. The threat had been made and heard. Tracy was still at the Mathis home, going about her daily life, doing everything right. She had left. She had gone to family. She had put distance between herself and the relationship she walked away from. And still, the situation was following her.

In the 11 days between April 6th and April 16th, the calls continued. The pressure continued. On the evening of April 16, 1991, Leroy Hall met up with two friends, Morris Forrester and Jeffrey Scott Green. The three men spent the evening drinking together. By the time several hours had passed, they had gone through approximately two and a half cases of beer between them. Hall was heavily drunk. Forrester went to bed around 10:30 p.m. Green saw Hall sometime between 10:30 and 11:00 p.m. and recognized that Hall was in no condition to drive. Green told him to stay. He said it directly: “You are too drunk to get behind the wheel. Stay here.” Hall refused. He got in his car. He drove into the night.

Hall drove through Chattanooga in the late hours of April 16th, moving in one direction. He was looking for Tracy. He drove to the places he associated with her, the areas he knew from 5 years of shared life. At some point during that drive, he arrived at the Mathis property, the same house he had been calling for weeks, the same address near which he had set fire to Tracy’s car 11 days earlier. Chris Mathis was there and confronted him. The exchange was not friendly. Chris made it plain. Hall was not welcome, and he needed to leave.

Hall left, but he did not go home. He drove to a nearby service station. He found a tea jug. He carried it to the pump and filled it with gasoline. He walked to the paper towel dispenser near the pumps and pulled out paper towels, stuffing them into the opening of the jug. He went to the counter inside the station and bought a cigarette lighter. He put the jug in his car. He drove back toward the area he had just come from.

He found Tracy sitting in her car near the Mathis house. He approached and got inside the vehicle with her. He told her he wanted to get back together. He wanted her to come home. She said no. She was clear. She did not want to reconcile. She told him to turn himself in to the police about the April 6th fire. He told her to get out of the car. He said he was going to burn it and he wanted her clear of it first. Tracy reached for her keys so she could drive away. Hall grabbed the keys before she could get them and threw them out of the car. Tracy was now inside a vehicle she could not start, and Hall was beside her. Hall went to his car and got the jug he had filled at the service station. He came back. He lit the paper towel fuse. He threw the burning device through the driver’s side window into the car where Tracy sat. The container exploded on contact. The car was immediately on fire. Tracy was inside it.

A woman named Viola Wylene Price was sitting in her own car outside her home on that same street. She saw what she described as a ball of fire appear suddenly in the middle of the road. The explosion was visible from a distance, large and immediate. Neighbors responded. One called emergency services. Another ran toward the burning car. At this time, Tracy had gotten out. She was on the ground in the street when the neighbor reached her. She was on fire. The neighbor worked to put the flames out. She was in terrible pain, and she was conscious. She gave the neighbor her name and her phone number. When the neighbor asked who had done this, she answered clearly, “Ray Hall.” The fire department arrived. Earl Atchley, the commander of the Chattanooga fire department on the scene, spoke to Tracy directly. She told him the same thing. Who had done this and what had happened. She was burned over almost her entire body, and she was still speaking, still alert, still naming him.

Paramedics took her from that street and transported her to Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga. At approximately 12:05 a.m. on April 17th, 1991, Tracy Crozier arrived at the hospital with burns covering 95% of her body. Only the soles of her feet had not been burned. The medical team at Erlanger Hospital that received Tracy had experience with serious burn injuries. Dr. Sonya Merriman was a burn specialist and plastic surgeon who had treated approximately 100 burn cases during her career. When Tracy arrived, what she saw was beyond anything in that experience. The burns covered 95% of Tracy’s body. Most of them were third-degree burns, the kind that go through every layer of skin and damage the tissue below. Tracy’s hair was gone, burned entirely from her body. Her teeth were charred. The pattern of the burns, the way they were spread across her body, told Dr. Merriman that the fuel had been directly on Tracy, not just near her. It had been on her skin when it caught fire.

The medical team gave her pain medication. It helped only partially. Burns that cover that much of the body are so overwhelming that pain medication cannot fully reach the level of suffering involved. The nerves in the burned areas were severely damaged, and the pain was constant. The medication reduced it, but it did not stop it. Dr. Merriman assessed Tracy’s condition and said it clearly: “These injuries were not survivable.” There was no medical treatment that could save her from what had been done to her. The question the team was managing was not whether she would survive. She would not. The question was how long her body could keep going. Tracy was conscious. She was awake and aware of where she was and what had happened to her. She was lying in that hospital in pain that no medication could fully control, and she was present through almost all of it.

While Tracy was at Erlanger, the investigation was already moving. Ed Forrester, the arson investigator with the Chattanooga Police Department, had been involved in this situation before. He had investigated the April 6th fire and had already been preparing an arrest warrant for Hall. Now, he was responding to another fire involving the same person, the same victim, and the same method. He examined what remained of the car. The most severe damage was concentrated on the driver’s side of the vehicle, the side where Tracy had been sitting. The metal was warped and discolored from extreme heat. The roof had caved slightly. The seat springs had weakened. The glass on the passenger side showed carbon staining from the fire. The glass on the driver’s side showed none of that, which meant it had been broken before the fire began, not by it. Someone had broken that window to get access to the inside of the car. Mike Donnelly, an investigator with the Tennessee Fire Marshal’s Office, examined the burn pattern in detail. The damage was consistent with an accelerant being applied directly to a person, not simply to a vehicle. The fire had started at the driver’s seat, where Tracy was sitting.

Hall was found and brought in for questioning. He denied being there. The denial fell apart quickly. Tracy had identified him twice to two different people in the street within minutes of the attack. He was already the subject of an active warrant from April 6th. The physical evidence at the scene matched everything Tracy had said. When the denial collapsed, Hall changed his story. He said yes, he had been there. Yes, he had made the device and thrown it. But he said he had not meant to hurt her. He said he wanted to burn the car. He said he thought she would get out first. He said she laughed at him when he asked her to come back, and that he reacted without thinking. Hall was officially arrested on April 17th, 1991. He was taken into custody in Chattanooga while Tracy was still alive at Erlanger Hospital, still fighting through the worst night and day of her life.

Tracy Crozier died at Erlanger Hospital on April 18th, 1991. She was 22 years old. Dr. Merriman had known from the moment Tracy arrived that the injuries were not survivable. The burns were too severe and too widespread. Everything the medical team did was aimed at managing her pain for as long as her body could hold on. She remained conscious through most of it. She had spoken to the neighbor in the street, to the fire commander at the scene, and to the people around her in the hospital. She held on through all of it until she could not hold on any longer. Gene Crozier lost his daughter. Stacy Wooten lost her sister. The Crozier family, built on real love and genuine closeness, now had a permanent hole in it that nothing could fill.

Hall was already in custody. The evidence from both fires had been collected. Tracy’s identification of Hall, given twice clearly while her body was still burning, was on record. His own admission was on record. In June of 1991, the Hamilton County Grand Jury indicted him on two charges: premeditated first-degree murder and aggravated arson. The murder charge carried the possibility of the death penalty. The defense could not deny the events happened. Hall had already admitted to being there and throwing the device. Their only argument was his intention, that he meant to burn the car, not kill Tracy. And that alcohol and emotional distress had driven a terrible impulsive decision rather than a deliberate plan to murder her. The prosecution saw it differently. He had taken her keys. He had broken the window for access. He had built the device step-by-step at a service station. He had burned her car 11 days earlier. He had told Chris Mathis exactly what he intended. That was not impulse. That was escalation.

The trial was set for March 3rd, 1992. Tracy had been dead for 10 months. The trial opened on March 3rd, 1992, in Hamilton County Circuit Court. Hall was 25 years old and had been in custody since the previous April. Ed Forrester took the stand first. He described the April 6th fire, the accelerant poured along the outside of Tracy’s car, the gasoline-positive jug found at the scene, and Hall’s words to Chris Mathis after that night: “If I can’t have her, nobody can’t.” He then walked through the April 16th fire: the driver’s side most severely damaged, the roof partially collapsed, and the driver’s window broken before the fire began, not by it. Mike Donnelly, the fire investigator, testified that the burn pattern was consistent with accelerant applied directly to a person. The fire had started at the driver’s seat where Tracy was sitting.

Dr. Merriman described Tracy’s injuries to the jury. 95% body surface burns, charred teeth, hair completely gone, the worst uniform burn case she had seen in roughly 100 cases. She confirmed Tracy had remained conscious for most of her time at the hospital and that her condition was unsalvageable from the moment she arrived. Earl Atchley confirmed that Tracy had identified Hall by name in the street while she was still burning. The prosecution then addressed Hall’s claim that he had not intended to hurt her. He had taken her keys before throwing the device. He had broken the window for access. The fire started at the driver’s seat where Tracy sat. The accelerant had been on her, not just the car. Every step, the jug, the fuse, the lighter, the drive back, had been deliberate.

The jury had eight days of testimony to absorb before Hall made a decision that placed him directly in their line of sight. He chose to take the witness stand himself. Hall took the witness stand. He described the night of April 16th in his own words. He talked about drinking with Morris Forrester and Jeffrey Scott Green. The two and a half cases of beer consumed over several hours, the decision to leave when Green told him to stay, the drive through Chattanooga looking for Tracy. He said he went to the Mathis house and was confronted by Chris Mathis. He said he felt threatened by the confrontation, which was why he stopped at the service station afterward and filled a jug with gasoline. He claimed it was for protection against Chris.

He described finding Tracy in her car, getting inside, asking her to come back to the relationship. He said she refused. He said she asked him to turn himself in to the police. He told her to get out because he was going to burn the car. She reached for her keys, and he took them first and threw them out of the car. He said she laughed at him when he said he wanted to reconcile and that he threw the lit device in that moment without thinking clearly. He said he did not mean to kill her. He said he thought she would get out. He said he intended to burn the car, not hurt her.

The prosecution cross-examined him carefully. If the device was for protection against Chris Mathis, why did he return toward the Mathis property after building it rather than simply going home? If he only meant to burn the car, why did he take Tracy’s keys and remove her ability to escape before throwing a lit container of fuel through the window she was sitting next to? If this was a decision made in a moment of drunken impulse, how did he manage to stop at a service station, fill a container with fuel, make a fuse, buy a lighter, and drive back, all as separate deliberate steps? Hall had no answers to those questions that changed what the evidence showed.

During the sentencing phase, the defense brought in their own expert witnesses. Clinical psychologist Dr. Roger Meyer testified about Hall’s background and mental state. He described Hall as emotionally immature, deeply introverted, unstable, and easily led by others. He said Hall had chronic, severe low self-esteem, and showed signs consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder. He described the relationship between Hall and Tracy as volatile. Psychiatrist Dr. Peter Brown testified that Hall had intended to send a message through the car, not to harm Tracy directly. The defense submitted a long list of mitigating factors, formal requests asking the jury to consider Hall’s troubled childhood, his documented psychological problems, his alcohol and drug dependency, his emotional immaturity, and his age of 24 at the time of the offense. They asked the jury to choose life in prison rather than death.

On March 11th, 1992, after 8 days of testimony, the jury returned its verdict. Leroy Hall Jr. was guilty of premeditated first-degree murder and aggravated arson. The same jury then moved to the sentencing phase. They found two aggravating factors: that the murder was especially cruel and involved serious suffering beyond what was needed to cause death, and that the murder was carried out in the course of committing arson. They weighed those factors against the mitigating evidence the defense had presented. They decided the aggravating factors were greater. They recommended death. The court sentenced Leroy Hall Jr. to death by electrocution, plus a concurrent 25-year sentence for the arson charge. He was transferred to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, where Tennessee housed its death row inmates. He arrived there in 1992, 25 years old.

Riverbend Maximum Security Institution was located on the outskirts of Nashville. Death row occupied its own section within the prison. A heavily controlled environment where movement was restricted, contact with the outside world was limited, and the daily reality of living under a sentence of death was a constant. Hall settled into that world. The people who encountered him during his years at Riverbend described someone very different from the person the crime and trial records depicted. The Reverend Kevin Riggs, a pastor who visited death row regularly, described Hall as soft-spoken, calm, and Christian in his daily conduct. His prison record was clean. He did not get into trouble. He did not accumulate disciplinary issues. He was, by all observable measures, a quiet and cooperative inmate. He changed his name while in prison. He filed a legal motion asking the court to update the style of his case from Leroy Hall Jr. to Lee Hall, the name he had started using inside Riverbend. The court approved the request. He set aside the name he had been given at birth and moved forward under the simpler version of it.

The appeals process began almost immediately after the verdict. A death sentence in the United States does not move directly to execution. It triggers a long sequence of legal reviews at multiple levels of the court system. The process was designed to be thorough, and it was slow by design. Hall’s attorneys raised 13 separate claims of error from the original trial, several of them with multiple sub-arguments, covering jury instructions, how mitigating evidence was handled, and other legal and constitutional questions. The first major stage was review by the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals. On December 30th, 1996, more than 4 years after the verdict, the court dismissed Hall’s direct appeal. His attorneys then took the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court. On December 15th, 1997, the Tennessee Supreme Court also rejected the appeal. In 1998, Hall’s attorneys filed a petition with the United States Supreme Court asking the justices to review the case. The Supreme Court declined.

Hall had originally been scheduled for execution in April of 1998. That date was set and then pushed back as the post-conviction legal proceedings, a separate track from the direct appeals, continued. The post-conviction process moved through the state courts. In 2005, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied Hall’s post-conviction appeal. The federal court process continued. In 2010, US District Judge J. Ronnie Greer of the Eastern District of Tennessee rejected Hall’s federal appeal. Every rejection closed another door. Every decision confirmed at one more level of the court system that the trial had been conducted without the kind of serious error that would justify overturning the verdict. The federal case, Hall v. Bell, ran to thousands of pages and took nearly two decades to exhaust. Hall continued living in the Riverbend death row unit year after year as the courts worked through and rejected his claims. He had arrived as a young man in his mid-20s. He was now moving through his 30s and into his 40s. And while the legal calendar moved forward, something else was happening that was entirely outside the legal process and could not be addressed by any appeal.

Lee Hall was losing his sight. In 2010, Hall was taken from Riverbend to an emergency room outside the prison. The diagnosis was advanced chronic angle-closure glaucoma. This was not a condition that had appeared suddenly. It was a condition that had been developing for some time without being identified or treated. And by the time doctors found it, it had already caused significant and permanent damage. Glaucoma works by blocking the normal drainage inside the eye, which causes pressure to build up against the optic nerve. When it is caught early and treated properly, it can be managed, and the loss of vision can be slowed or stopped. When it goes undetected and untreated, the pressure destroys the optic nerve progressively. Once that damage happens, it cannot be reversed. By the time Hall’s glaucoma was found in 2010, it had already progressed to an advanced stage. The window for preventing major vision loss had already passed.

His attorneys documented in detail what happened after the diagnosis. They reported that the Tennessee Department of Correction repeatedly failed to follow the recommendations of Hall’s own eye doctors in the years after 2010. Appointments with eye specialists were delayed and canceled. Medications that had been prescribed to slow the disease were not consistently given to him. Even basic accommodations, such as a clock with large numbers that would help him function as his vision declined, were refused by prison officials. Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, reviewed Hall’s medical situation and was direct about what he found. He said it was highly likely that Hall had gone blind as a direct result of inadequate medical care. Glaucoma is treatable. The blindness, in his assessment, was not an inevitable outcome of the condition. It was a preventable outcome that had happened because the institution responsible for Hall’s health had not done what it was required to do.

Hall’s attorneys argued in formal legal petitions that executing a man whose blindness was caused by the prison’s own failures was a form of cruel and unusual punishment. They described what it would look like, guiding a blind man to an electric chair, and argued that it was the kind of act that the legal system should not allow. They referenced existing Supreme Court precedents about the limits of who can be executed. No court accepted their argument, but the argument was made in full and entered into the record. By the time Hall’s vision was completely gone, he needed other people to help him get through the day. Fellow death row inmates guided him. When Reverend Riggs visited and walked Hall back to his cell afterward, Hall held the back of the Reverend’s jacket with his hand to stay oriented as they moved through the corridor together. The man who had thrown a burning device through Tracy Crozier’s car window, the man whose act had destroyed her sight in her final hours as the fire consumed her hair and skin and eyes, had himself gone completely blind in a prison cell in Nashville, helped by other condemned men who could see but were also waiting to die.

In 2014, a court set a new execution date for Hall, January 12th, 2016. That date was then stayed due to ongoing legal fights across the country over the drugs used in lethal injection executions. The execution did not happen in 2016. On November 16th, 2018, the state of Tennessee set execution dates for six death row inmates. Lee Hall was on that list. His date was set for December 5th, 2019. He had been at Riverbend for 27 years. He was blind, and the final stage of his legal life had just begun. From the day the December 5th, 2019 execution date was confirmed, Hall’s attorneys had roughly 13 months to make whatever final legal moves were still open to them.

During those months, something new came to light. Something that had never been part of the case before, and it became the center of the last fight to save Hall’s life. It started with one of the women who had sat on Hall’s jury back in 1992. In court records and news coverage, she was referred to only as Juror A. In 2019, more than 27 years after the trial, she came forward and revealed something she had never disclosed when she was chosen for that jury. Between 1969 and 1975, she had been married to her first husband. During that marriage, he had repeatedly raped her and physically abused her. He had shot and killed himself in 1975, years before Hall’s trial. She had never spoken publicly about what he had done to her. And in 1992, when lawyers questioned potential jurors before Hall’s trial and asked whether anyone had personal experiences that could affect their ability to be fair, she said nothing about any of it.

Hall’s attorneys moved quickly. They argued that a woman who had been abused and raped by her husband should not have been sitting on a jury for a case about a man who had been violent toward a woman he was in a relationship with. Her past was directly connected to the facts of the case she was being asked to decide. By not disclosing that past during jury selection, she had denied Hall his legal right to a fair trial. His attorneys asked the courts for a new trial or, at the very least, a delay of the execution so the issue could be properly examined. Their argument had strong support from something that had just happened that same week. The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals had ordered a brand new trial for another death row inmate named Hubert Glenn Sexton for almost exactly the same reason. A juror in Sexton’s case had also hidden relevant personal history during jury selection, and the court found that this had made the trial unfair. The legal question in Hall’s case and in Sexton’s case was the same. The facts were nearly identical. The only real difference was timing. Sexton’s attorneys had raised the issue early enough to get a full review. Hall’s attorneys had only just found out about Juror A with the execution weeks away.

They took the petition to Hamilton County Circuit Court. Judge Don Poole agreed to hold a hearing. In November 2019, Juror A came to the courthouse and testified in person. She described her marriage, the abuse, the rape, the years she had lived through it. She said that at the time, she had not thought of herself as a victim. In 1969, the words domestic abuse and marital rape were not commonly used the way they are today. She had not recognized what her husband was doing to her as a crime. She said that was genuinely why she had not mentioned it on the jury questionnaire. She said she was not biased against Hall. But she admitted that during the trial, she had said she hated him. She explained that the feeling came during his testimony, specifically when he described how he had called Tracy repeatedly, followed her, and burned her car. That, she said, was when she felt it. Hall’s attorneys said that explanation was not enough. A juror who admitted to hating the defendant, regardless of when that feeling developed, had not been a neutral and impartial decision-maker. That was a constitutional problem.

Judge Poole denied the petition on November 15th, 2019. The Tennessee Supreme Court turned down the appeal on December 3rd. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the next petition on December 4th, the night before the scheduled execution. Hall’s attorneys issued a public statement. They said the Tennessee Supreme Court was going ahead with executing Lee Hall on December 5th, refusing to let him present his jury bias evidence to a court that had just granted that exact same opportunity to another inmate on the same legal grounds the week before. They called it a rush to the electric chair. Governor Bill Lee released his own statement on December 4th. He said the justice system had reviewed Hall’s case thoroughly for nearly 30 years. He said the sentence stood. He said he would not step in.

One day remained, and Hall had already decided how he was going to spend it. Tennessee had two ways of carrying out an execution. The standard method was lethal injection, a sequence of drugs administered through a needle that stops the heart. But there was a second option. Any inmate who had been sentenced to death before January 1st, 1999, had the right to choose the electric chair instead. Hall had been sentenced in 1992, which meant that choice was available to him. On November 7th, 2019, he made it. He chose the electric chair. His attorney, Kelly Gleeson, noted publicly that this decision carried a specific historical weight. Hall was blind. No blind person in modern American history had ever been executed by electrocution. The only other blind person executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 was Clarence Ray Allen, a 76-year-old man put to death by lethal injection in California in 2006. Hall would be the second blind person executed in the country since that time, and the first to die in the electric chair. Hall’s legal team had argued in earlier filings that executing a blind person was especially cruel, that guiding someone who could not see to an electric chair was an act the legal system should not permit. No court had agreed with that argument. It had been heard and rejected.

On the evening of December 5th, 2019, at 6:18 p.m., less than an hour before the scheduled execution, the United States Supreme Court rejected Hall’s final petition for a stay. There were no more courts to appeal to, no more motions to file. Every door had been closed. Hall had been placed on death watch earlier in the week. Death watch is the 72-hour period before an execution during which an inmate is moved to a cell directly next to the execution chamber and watched around the clock by a dedicated team of officers. Visitors are restricted. Movement is limited. It is the period in which the institution makes plain that the end is very close. Before Hall was moved from his regular cell to the death watch cell, his fellow death row inmates helped him pack up his belongings. He was distributing his possessions to the people around him. He was blind and he could not see what he was holding as he gave each item away.

At Riverbend that evening, Gene Crozier and Stacy Wooten arrived. They had waited 28 years for this night. Gene had described his motivations simply and directly across all those years: love of Tracy, the need to be her voice because there was nobody else. He had shown up for every court date, every press conference, every interview that required him to describe what had happened to his daughter. He was there again now for the last time. Stacy had done the same. She had spoken about her sister publicly more times than she could count, describing what happened on April 16th, 1991, and who Tracy had been before that night. Making sure that the legal proceedings did not reduce her sister to a case number. She was tired and she was ready. Hall’s brother, David, also came. He would sit in the witness room and watch. He had sat in the Hamilton County courtroom in November while his brother’s attorneys made their final arguments. He had come to Nashville for the conclusion. Outside the prison, members of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty held vigils across the state. Jerome Dempsey, the best friend of Chris Mathis, Tracy’s uncle, stood near the prison with a handmade poster. It had Tracy’s photograph on it. It said, “Justice for Tracy.”

Inside Riverbend, the clock moved towards 7:00 p.m. At 7:13 p.m., the black curtain across the four rectangular windows between the execution chamber and the witness room was pulled back. The witnesses could see Lee Hall. He was already strapped into the electric chair. He was blind. He could not see the windows. He could not see the people watching from the other side of the glass. He could not see the room he was in. His head moved slightly from side to side. He rolled his tongue in his mouth. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. At 7:14 p.m., the warden asked for his last words. Hall said he needed water first. Then he spoke. His voice was low, and most of what he said was hard to hear from the witness side of the glass, but several words came through clearly: hope, forgiveness, and love. The full version of what he said, pieced together from multiple witness accounts, was that people could learn forgiveness and love and make the world a better place. Those were his final words.

At 7:18 p.m., the first electrical current was applied. The current moved through Hall’s body. His physical response was visible to the witnesses watching through the windows. From the right side of his head, something that appeared to be smoke rose during both applications of the current. About 20 seconds after the first jolt, a second burst of current was applied, 1,750 volts. After the second current, Hall’s head dropped to one side. His body rose slightly from the seat of the chair, his hands tightening into fists. Then his whole body relaxed, and he sank back into the chair. At 7:26 p.m. Central Time, Lee Hall was pronounced dead at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 53 years old. He was the 138th person executed in Tennessee since 1916. He was the sixth person executed in the state since Tennessee resumed executions in August 2018. He was the fourth of those six to die in the electric chair. He was the second blind person executed in the United States since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 and the first blind person in modern American history to be executed by electrocution.

After the execution, Hall’s attorney, John Spragens, came to the microphone outside the prison and read the statement Hall had written before his death. Hall apologized to the Crozier family. He asked for their forgiveness. He said he hoped and prayed that someday they could find it in their hearts to forgive him. He apologized to his brother David, to his mother, and to his family. He said he was sorry for the pain he had caused them, and that he hoped his death would bring peace, and that he did not want them to worry about him anymore. Spragens then read the statement from Hall’s family. They said they were devastated by the loss of Tracy and now Lee. They said Lee had loved Tracy more than anything and that they had welcomed her and loved her. They said they wished they could have changed the events of that tragic day. They said Lee had not intended to cause her death or the pain she went through. They said they had all lost, but they found peace knowing both Tracy and Lee were with God.

Then Stacy Wooten walked to the microphone. She read the words she had prepared. She said the day had come and gone. The day her family had waited 28 years for. She said their family’s peace could begin now, but another family’s pain had to start. She said the day had not brought her sister back. She said she hoped Tracy could find peace in heaven with their mother. She said they had all fought for Tracy and that today they had won. She stepped back. The reporters went to file their stories. The families walked to their cars. The case was closed. If this story stayed with you, subscribe to No Way Out. Every case we cover is someone’s whole life. We tell it that way.