By the summer of 1955, Charlie Sullins had exhausted all legal avenues in Tennessee appealing his death sentence for his role in a fatal armed robbery.
Though his accomplice, Harry Kirkendoll, had fired the shot that killed 63-year-old Ed Collier on March 3, 1953, a jury found Sullins guilty as an accessory in the gas station robbery in Lebanon, Tennessee.
In the eyes of Tennessee’s criminal justice system at the time, it was as if he had pulled the trigger himself.
Both men were sentenced to die by electrocution on Aug. 1, 1955, strapped into the wooden chair dubbed “Old Smokey.”
Seventy years ago, Sullins sat behind the cold bars of death row….