The Intercept:

JOYCE HOUSE WON’T FORGET the day she discovered that her son, Paul, could no longer walk on his own. She was getting ready to leave the visitation room at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when another man asked a guard for permission to speak to her for a moment. “Ms. House, Paul don’t want you to know it,” he said, “but he can’t walk.” Someone had been carrying Paul from his cell for their visits. The man’s name was Nicholas Sutton, but most people called him Nick. Like her son, he was on Tennessee’s death row.

House was stunned. She knew her son was sick — after being sentenced to die in 1986 for a murder he swore he didn’t commit, Paul had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which had gone untreated for years. Still, she had not realized how much the illness had already ravaged his body. She went home and confirmed what she had been told, later requesting a walker for Paul. But the warden refused, saying he might hurt somebody. Sutton continued to carry her son to his visits, but it was no longer a secret. “Nick would bring him out,” House recalled. “Carry him on his shoulders.”

Paul House was finally exonerated in 2009, although the state has never acknowledged his innocence — or compensated him for his decades on death row. Today he is 58 and lives with his mother in Crossville, Tennessee, some two hours east of Nashville. He has regained the weight that he lost in prison and gets around on a motorized scooter. But he can no longer see very well and lesions on his brain make it hard to communicate. A caretaker assists with feeding and bathing him — the same daily tasks that went neglected by the Tennessee Department of Correction for years. It was often Sutton who gave him the kind of care that the state refused to provide.

FULL STORY HERE