The State of Tennessee is getting set to execute Oscar Smith tomorrow, May 22 2025, for a triple murder
According to court documents Oscar Smith would murder his estranged wife Judith Smith, and her sons, Jason and Chad, 13 and 16. Police would arrive at the scene shortly after the triple murders however they found the home to be so quiet they assumed it was a false alarm. The three bodies would be found at the Nashville Tennessee home the next day
Oscar Smith would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Oscar Smith Execution News
The triple murder committed by Tennessee death row inmate Oscar Franklin Smith proves one thing, according to a detective who worked the decades-old case: “True evil exists.”
Smith, 75, is set to be executed by lethal injection for the 1989 murder of his estranged wife, 35-year-old Judith Robirds Smith, and her sons, 13-year-old Jason Burnett and 16-year-old Chad Burnett. The three were murdered inside their Nashville home.
“The boys were brutalized,” retired Metro Nashville Police Department Detective Pat Postiglione told The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network, back in 2022. “True evil exists.”
Smith’s attorney, Kelley Henry, told USA TODAY that Smith has always maintained his innocence and that the last two weeks have been hard on him because corrections officials moved him into a small cell near the execution chamber.
“This type of isolation is incredibly traumatizing. It is also unnecessary,” she told USA TODAY. “There has never been an instance of difficulty on Tennessee’s death row in the two weeks prior to execution.”
As the execution approaches, USA TODAY is looking back at the crime, who Smith is, and who his victims were.
On the night of Oct. 1, 1989, a Nashville police dispatcher answered a 911 call from 13-year-old Jason Burnett, who managed to scream, “Help me!” as the garbled voice of his brother can be heard saying: “Frank, no! God help me,” according to court records.
Following the frantic call, police officers responded to the home, said they saw nothing unusual and chalked the call up to a false alarm, court records said. But inside, both boys and their mother had been murdered.
Fifteen hours after the 911 call, an 8-year-old relative found the three bodies inside the home, their throats slashed ear to ear.
Judith Robirds Smith also had a gunshot wound to the left arm and her neck, and had been stabbed multiple times, according to The Tennessean. Jason, an eight-grader, was laying on his side at the food of the bed where his mother was.
Chad, a high school sophomore, was found lying in a pool of blood on his back in the kitchen, court records said. He had been shot through his left eye, upper chest, and shoulder and had been stabbed several times with a sharp, needle-like weapon and with a knife
Smith was questioned by police the next day. They saw his reaction to the news of his estranged family’s murder as a red flag.
“When they told him, he showed no emotion,” former Davidson County deputy district attorney Tom Thurman told The Tennessean.
Smith had threatened his estranged wife multiple times before committing the murders and a month beforehand, had tied her up, raped her, and threatened to kill her, court records said.
Oscar Smith also called her several times at the Waffle House where she worked, threatening to kill her, and even telling her father that he would kill his daughter, according to court records.
“Smith told Judy’s father, ‘You tell Judy that I’ve been playing with her with kid gloves, but now the gloves are coming off.’ Another time he said that he would kill Judy if she ever left him,” prosecutors said in court records.
On several occasions, Oscar Smith is said to have offered money to anybody willing to kill his estranged wife, court records said.
Oscar Smith had two teenage children from a previous marriage, while Chad and Jason were Judy Smith’s sons from a previous marriage.
When the couple married in 1985, they had twin boys of their own. But by June 1989, they separated and a custody battle ensued over the twins.
Teresa Zastrow, Judy Smith’s sister, told police that Oscar Smith had abused her sister on several occasions. Don Robirds, Judy’s father, told The Tennessean that on one occasion in 1988, Judy asked him and his wife to sign a note telling her husband where she had been.
“One time, she came to the house and she said that she had to have a signed paper before she went home,” Robirds said. “My wife had to sign the paper. That was the only real clue that Judy had ever given us.”
As the oldest inmate on Tennessee’s death row, Oscar Smith’s execution date has previously been scheduled three times, but was delayed for various reasons. If the execution moves forward this time, Smith will be the first inmate executed in Tennessee since 2020 and the 19th in the U.S. this year.
The last time Oscar Smith was about to be executed was in 2022, when the execution was called off just an hour before it was scheduled.
At that time, Republican Gov. Bill Lee issued a temporary reprieve due to an oversight in the state’s lethal injection protocol. The oversight ultimately led to a three-year moratorium on executions in Tennessee, an independent audit and a new protocol.
Following the end of that moratorium, Oscar Smith is set to be the first execution in the state since 2020, but his defense lawyers filed a lawsuit along with eight other death row inmates to challenge Tennessee’s new protocol, saying there is a high risk of torturous death.
“We have genuine and well-founded concerns that the new protocol − which contains even fewer safeguards than the last − will cause our clients to experience the terror, pain, and suffering that comes from the act of poisoning called for in the protocol,” attorney Amy Harwell said in a letter to Lee in April.
Their concerns center around the state of Tennessee’s usage of the drug pentobarbital, which Harwell said in the letter can cause executions to last as long as 20 minutes, where the inmate could remain aware and experience what she called “chemical waterboarding.”
State authorities argue that the execution method is constitutional and effective.
On Tuesday, Lee rejected a clemency request from Smith, further clearing the way for the execution to take place.