Tennessee Court Stays Execution of Man Who Raped, Killed Child

The state Supreme Court issued a stay of execution Monday for a child rapist and murderer who was scheduled to be the first person executed in the state since 1960.

The court ruled Robert Glen Coe needed more time to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider a request to hear an appeal of his 1981 conviction for killing an 8-year-old girl in Greenfield.

Coe was to die by injection on Oct. 19. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review his case last week.

Tennessee is the only Southern state that hasn’t executed anyone since the high court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. The state has 99 men and two women on death row.

Coe, 43, said that in 1979, he kidnapped Cary Ann Medlin near her home, raped and sodomized her, then choked her and stabbed her in the throat with a pocket knife. The former auto mechanic told an FBI agent that he became enraged when the girl kept saying, “Jesus loves you.”

Coe recanted before his 1981 trial and his lawyers used an insanity defense. The jury took an hour to convict him.

His lawyers have argued that there was no scientific evidence linking Coe to the crime, that the confession was unreliable and that evidence pointing to another man had been hidden or destroyed.

In 1996, Coe’s conviction was set aside by a federal judge who said the jury was not given proper guidance. But a federal appeals court reinstated the conviction.