Fight the Death
Penalty in USAwww.fdp.dk
Penalty in USA
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Penalty in USA www.fdp.dk |
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mental retardation or extremely limited mental competence, whether at the stage of sentence or execution |
Americans seem willing to execute almost anybody
In 1985, Virginia executed Morris Mason, a mentally retarded, mentally ill 32-year-old man. Shortly before he was taken to the execution chamber, he asked 2 visitors to tell another death row inmate that "when I get back, I'm gonna show him I can play basketball as good as
he can." President Clinton took time off from his 1992 campaign to be in Arkansas for the execution of killer Rickey Ray Rector. He was so brain damaged from a suicide attempt that he asked guards to set aside his piece of pecan pie so he could eat it after his execution, according to the New York Times. And Texas appears willing to kill Johnny Paul Penry, a rapist-murderer with moderate retardation and a childhood filled with severe physical abuse and neglect. Johnny Penry's life started with a difficult birth during which his mother nearly died from her blood loss. She brutalized the boy for the next decade, beating him and burning him with cigarettes. He was locked in a room and left in his own waste. He never finished 1st grade. He bounced in and out of state hospitals with consistent diagnoses of mental retardation and behavioral problems. Like most people with retardation, Mr. Penry is not profoundly retarded. Throughout his lifetime, his "full scale" IQ has been assessed between 43 and 63. The cutoff for low-normal intelligence is usually set at 70. His adaptive skills--how well he could handle social interactions and daily life--were poor. But, like many people with mild retardation, he works hard to conceal his deficiency. He can fool most laypeople for short periods. At 21, he pleaded guilty to rape. 2 years later, in August 1979, he was released despoite a parole report full of warnings. In October 1979, he went to the Livingston home of Pamela Moseley Carpenter. He forced his way in and raped her. Ms Carpenter, a well-liked member of a prominent local family, apparently tried to defend herself with a pair of scissors she had been using to make Halloween costumes. He grabbed the scissors and stabbed her. She identified him before dying at the hospital. Mr. Penry voluntarily went with police, confessed and signed the police-typed statements, even though he could not read or write. A jury sentenced him to death. His attorney appealed. His case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which returned a split tuling in 1989. The high court stated that jurors should have been able to consider Mr. Penry's mental abilities as a mitigating factor when assessing punishment. That part of his trial needed to be reheard. But the court also decided, infamously, that executing mentally retarded prisoners was not unconstitutionally cruel. Mr. Penry was retried in Texas and again sentenced to death. He was scheduled for execution in May but received a stay. True, Johnny Paul Penry's 2nd trial was more fair that his 1st. He still lost. Now, what do the people of Texas gain by executing him? The state will prevent him from hurting anyone else - but it could do that by keeping him in prison for the rest of his life. Will his execution teach similar people a lesson? Probably not. He has diifficulty understanding his own situation; other people wilgh mental retardation and poor impulse control probably won't understand and learn from it, either. Meanwhile, there are many reasons not to execute Johnny Paul Penry. There is the capriciousness of capital punishment. Other defendants, with full mental capacities and fewer childhood traumas, have committed similar violence or crimes with greater premeditation - yet have not received a death sentence. There is no good explanation why his crime was so much worse that he deserves execution. There is the issue of justice. For the family of Johnny Penry's victim, justice will come when he is brought into the execution chamber. For Johnny Paul Penry, justice has no meaning. He cannot understand it. He has not experienced it. His family and law enforcement authorities failed to protect him from his mother; she was not punished for the abuse she inflicted on her son. He is paying for his crimes, but the people who hurt him will not pay for theirs. There is the issue of morality. Should a civilized society levy its most extreme punishment against someone who cannot fully understand it? Against someone who could not help his own lawyers defend him? Against someone who may have confessed to "help out" the police, not realizing he's just helped himself to the death chamber? Other states, including Nebraska and Georgia, bar the execution of prisoners with mental retardation. Texas should not allow it. It is pointless. It is immoral. E.J. Montini, The Arizona Republic, February 2001 Just about 5 years ago, a slow-witted murderer named Luis Mata invited me to watch him die. Mata and his brother, Alonzo, had been at the state prison in Florence for nearly 20 years by then. They'd been convicted of brutally killing a woman named Debra Lopez in 1977. After a trial and appeals, Alonzo received life in prison, and Luis was sentenced to death. By the time Mata invited me to his execution, the original prosecutor on the case had changed his mind about Mata's sentence. Attorneys representing Mata produced mental health evaluations and evidence of childhood brain injuries that suggested Mata had the IQ of a paperweight. "None of this critical information was presented at Luis Mata's sentencing hearing," said the prosecutor, Michael Donovan. "Quite frankly, after reviewing these materials, I am shocked and upset that this information had not been presented. . . . Had I known this information, I would not have requested or pursued a death sentence." Mata was killed anyway. Back then, the state of Arizona had no problem executing mentally retarded murderers. We still don't. The subject came up recently at the Capital Case Commission, a 30-member panel meeting to examine how Arizona defines and administers the death penalty. The bottom line is: Arizona really likes it. One member of the commission, attorney James Bush, suggested that the commission urge legislators to pass a law banning the execution of retarded killers. 13 states with death penalties already prohibit such executions. Bush's reasoning is simple. "If a state won't execute a juvenile who commits murder because he's too young, it doesn't make much sense to execute a man who's 30 but with the mind of a 6-year-old," he said. Unfortunately, logic has nothing to do with the death penalty. Neither does fairness. Or common sense. The national Death Penalty Information Center claims 35 mentally retarded prisoners have been executed in the United States in recent years. "The problem most people have with changing the (Arizona) law concerns the guidelines," Bush said. "People are concerned about establishing fair standards. They don't want to create a situation like the one we have with people deemed 'mentally incompetent.' People might fake it." While mentally retarded murderers can be put to death in Arizona, state law doesn't permit the execution of the insane, at least in theory. The truth is, the statute is crazier than that. It says we must give a lunatic enough treatment to make him competent, then kill him. Some members of the Legislature are trying to sort out the mental competency mess, making it more rational. It won't work. It can't. A system that sanctions the execution of the mentally retarded - even if they're murderers - is itself deranged. That's one of the reasons I declined Luis Mata's invitation back in 1996. Not because he deserved pity or mercy. He didn't. But killing is a messy business, even in these days of tidy lethal injection. You can't rationalize it or sanitize it. You can only abolish it. And that's not likely as long the lunatics are running the asylum we call state government. St. Petersburg Timers Dec 7, 1999 Freddie Lee Hall has brain damage. Freddie Lee Hall has an IQ of 60. Freddie Lee Hall was tortured by his mother. Freddie Lee Hall thinks he is cursed by the "Root Man". Freddie Lee Hall is also a convicted killer, and the same judge who acknowledged Hall's "serious mental difficulties" chose not to put him in prison for life but to sentence him to death. * * * Freddie Lee Hall has an IQ of 60. He has brain damage, learning disabilities, and the intellect of a small child. The 16th of 17 children, young Freddie was tortured by his mother, sometimes stuffed in a sack and swung over a fire or tied to the rafters and beaten. Now a tall, hulking adult whose whispered speech is almost incomprehensible, Hall is delusional and blames his troubles on the curse of a wizard-like character he calls the "Root Man." According to the state of Florida, he is also something else: a cold, devious, calculating killer who deserves nothing less than the ultimate punishment of death. Hall's case is extraordinary in many respects. 21 years ago, he and a partner, Mack Ruffin Jr., murdered a young pregnant woman. As they fled authorities, the 2 shot and killed a popular and personable Hernando County sheriff's deputy, enshrining themselves as 2 of the county's most notorious criminals. But Ruffin is serving a life sentence while Hall was condemned to die for the woman's death -- even though a judge admitted that Hall was retarded and that Ruffin could very well have been the triggerman. Prosecutors argued that Hall, physically bigger and older than Ruffin, used considerable powers of persuasion to make Ruffin kill. 2 judges, juries and the Florida Supreme Court so far have bought the argument. Curiously, they believe a man with the mind of a child to be a mastermind. The prosecutorial argument is perplexing enough, but the death sentence in itself raises a question that is percolating across America: If capital punishment is intended to punish the most culpable criminals for the most horrible crimes, is it right to execute someone so retarded or so deranged that he cannot fully comprehend his crime or his punishment? The U.S. Supreme Court has already declared that states cannot execute people who are insane, though it has not resolved whether they can execute people who are retarded. As a matter of law, most states prohibit the execution of insane criminals, and 12 states and Congress also have outlawed putting retarded killers to death. Sadly, Florida continues to do both. But this is one death penalty debate on which both sides ought to find common ground. If the courts say the state can't execute anyone younger than 17, should the state execute a man who is, mentally speaking, a boy? Given the available alternative of life in prison, the answer is clear. "To execute (a retarded person) is like executing someone who understands things as a child does," says Denis Keyes, a professor of special education at the College of Charleston, who has testified as an expert witness in several capital cases in Florida and around the country. "But that does seem to be the way we're going." The same system that has put Hall, now 54, on death row has already sent at least 34 arguably retarded men to their deaths in this nation since 1976, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center. In Florida, at least 3 cases have been identified, and an untold number of other mentally incompetent men are awaiting their death dates. Nollie Lee Martin was executed May 12, 1992, after the courts refused to be swayed by top researchers from Harvard, Yale and New York Universities who concluded that Martin suffered psychosis and severe organic brain damage that could have led him to commit murder and almost certainly prevented him from understanding his fate. Arthur Frederick Goode III failed to convince the Florida Supreme Court that he was incompetent to be executed, despite being diagnosed with mental retardation as a young boy and, with an IQ of about 60, being compared by one noted psychiatrist to a "small child" who could never appreciate the meaning of the death penalty. James Dupree Henry was convicted of 1st-degree murder in 1974 and condemned to death. 10 years later new evidence and testimony from an NYU doctor revealed that he was an "intellectually limited brain- damaged individual," but the Supreme Court said it was too late. Henry was executed Sept. 20, 1984. It is difficult to know how many of Florida's about 370 condemned inmates are retarded. Some experts estimate as many as 10 % to 15 % of the nation's death row inmates are retarded. Many more are mentally ill with conditions from psychosis to paranoid schizophrenia. What is clear is that the issue of mental competence to be executed is raised in dozens of cases and, as long as Florida fails to deal with the issue, it will continue to bog down a judiciary that already spends too much time on the death penalty. Often, there is a pattern to these cases. If a defendant's state of mental health is raised at all during the original guilt phase of a trial, the jury often is swayed more by state experts than those hired by the defense. Occasionally, inexperienced or ignorant defense lawyers miss or do not even raise the issue, and if they do, they frequently do not explore all the available tests. When the defense does present medical evidence, the state always finds an expert to disagree. A retarded defendant, meanwhile, often is advised not to take the stand to explain himself. "They don't make good witnesses. They cannot assist in their own defense," argues Frank Mann of Alva, a former legislator who has lobbied on behalf of the Florida Association for Retarded Citizens. "That's what separates them from everyone else in society." The question of an inmate's competency for execution is different from his competency to stand trial. Indeed, the threshold for a death sentence should be much higher. The Florida case of Alvin Ford helps set some of the legal framework for this debate. Raising questions about Ford's mental competence since he had been sentenced to death row, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 13 years ago that executing an insane inmate would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The majority ruled that Ford, who suffered from well-documented mental illness, had been deemed competent for execution by a flawed system. Florida's law requires that, to be considered sane for execution, an inmate must understand "the nature and effect of the death penalty and why it is to be imposed upon him or her." If a defendant argues incompetence, the governor appoints a panel of 3 experts to examine him. Before the Ford case, the final decision was left to the governor and the defense had no chance to challenge it. The Ford ruling set an important precedent: The final say over a convict's competence to be executed should lie with the courts. Still, though, the law is vague and open to interpretation. The Ford decision left huge questions lingering, most notably how the courts should interpret disagreements among mental health professionals. What's more, no law in Florida directly addresses the issue of retardation. In Florida, where potential jurors who oppose the death penalty are often automatically tossed out of the pool and where it takes merely a majority of the jury to recommend death, there is rarely enough of an open-minded evaluation of a killer's past troubles or mental condition to block a death sentence. As a result, retarded and mentally ill men such as Freddie Lee Hall routinely wind up on death row. "The bottom line is that as long as we continue to make these life and death decisions, we will do it with imperfections, with flaws," says Michael Radelet, a University of Florida sociology professor and death penalty expert who wrote a book on the Ford case. "It leaves it open to great arbitrariness." Hall's case, which has been tossed back and forth between courts as jurors and judges struggle to grapple with his mental condition, cuts to the heart of the system's many problems. His original 1978 death sentence was overturned when a divided Florida Supreme Court concluded that his jury did not have ample opportunity to consider his brutal childhood or limited intellect. But, even when jurors and a judge reconsidered his sentence in 1990, taking into account Hall's abuse, impoverished childhood, brain damage and longstanding retardation, he once again received a death sentence. A series of experts testified that Hall was retarded, with an IQ that one doctor measured at 60. One expert said he had the intellect of a 13-year-old. The new jury voted 8-4 to recommend death. Circuit Judge Richard Tombrink acknowledged that Hall was retarded but sentenced him to die nevertheless. "The Court finds that the greater weight of the evidence would support a finding that the defendant may have lacked some ability to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law," Tombrink wrote in his sentencing order. "However, the Court is not able to determine to what extent the defendant's abilities to appreciate or to conform were impaired." The judge went even further in denying a later appeal, saying there is "no doubt" that Hall suffers from "serious mental difficulties, is probably somewhat retarded, and certainly has learning difficulties and a speech impairment." In other words, Tombrink admitted Hall was mentally deficient but still chose to condemn him. Most recently, in July, the Florida Supreme Court denied an appeal by Hall's lawyers, who claimed he was not competent to be resentenced in 1990. The ruling was unanimous, but Justice Harry Lee Anstead wrote a special opinion lamenting Hall's fate, saying that "although it appears the majority opinion is technically correct," he believes that executing a mentally retarded inmate violates the state Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Barbara Pariente joined Anstead, who quoted at length a 1993 dissenting opinion by then-Justice Rosemary Barkett objecting to the denial of another Hall appeal. Barkett, who went on to become a federal judge, wrote that the sentencing judge clearly did not understand the nature of mental retardation. To execute a retarded person, she wrote, is cruel and unusual. "This case is illustrative of far too many cases we see in this Court; horrible crimes are repeatedly committed by those who endure sickening abuse and deprivation as children," Barkett wrote. "Many, like Freddie Lee Hall, are also mentally retarded, and suffer particularly severe abuse because their parents do not understand the nature of retardation. "The connection between an individual's childhood and his or her later ability to function as a productive member of society is obvious to those of us who routinely review criminal cases, and while a tragic childhood and mental retardation do not "excuse' later criminal behavior, they do reflect on an individual's culpability." But not everyone sees an injustice in Hall's case. Gov. Jeb Bush cited Hall in a recent e-mail as an example of what's right with the state's justice system. Bush's note, indicative of the response of many Florida lawmakers over the years, reveals that, like Tombrink, he does not appreciate the effects of mental health. Further, he endorses the death penalty as a form of retribution for the loved ones of murder victims. "I agree with the court that juries should be allowed to consider the heinous nature of the crime, the impact on the victim's friends, loved ones, and community as a whole when considering the appropriate sentence," Bush wrote. "In short, I feel that the law in Florida properly allows juries and sentencing judges to consider diminished capacity as a mitigating factor and to give it the weight they deem appropriate in light of all the circumstances surrounding the murder." Unfortunately, mental health questions have proved too complicated for juries and judges to handle appropriately. The mound of often conflicting medical evidence puts fairness out of reach. "This is making God-like decisions without God-like skills," says Radelet, the UF sociologist. "Our record is such that the question is not so much who deserves to die but who deserves to kill." In determining who should live and who should die, no players are more central than the medical experts who educate jurors and judges about an inmate's mental health. Far too often the state hires psychologists and psychiatrists who simply rubber-stamp death. Thomas Provenzano, convicted 15 years ago of killing an Orange County court bailiff during a bizarre courtroom shootout, has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic who believes that he must die because he is Jesus Christ. Patricia Fleming, a Wyoming psychologist hired by the defense who has known him for a decade, examined Provenzano for 15 hours and found him unfit. She noted his description of a "legion of bad spirits that possess you or me." When his lawyers invoked the state's competency law, arguing that Provenzano's problems have been exacerbated on death row, the governor appointed 3 experts who interviewed him for 80 minutes. Their conclusion: Provenzano is faking his illness. They based their findings largely on prison guards, who told them that Provenzano seemed normal. In the case of Alvin Ford, who Radelet said "couldn't utter a complete sentence," a panel of state-appointed experts met with him for less than 30 minutes and concluded he was competent for execution. In 1984, a panel of state-paid doctors examined inmate Arthur Frederick Goode in private and then concluded, in secret letters to the governor, that he was competent to be executed. Such a cloaked process -- with the governor having the final say -- was allowed under the law at that time. Defense lawyers argued that the exam took less than 30 minutes and that the doctors ignored Goode's well-documented history of retardation. Goode, after all, committed murder in Florida after escaping from a mental hospital in Maryland. Hoping to convince the Florida Supreme Court that Goode should be spared, the defense hired Dr. George W. Barnard, a veteran University of Florida psychiatrist and founder of his department's forensics division. Barnard examined Goode, noting that the inmate had a difficult time focusing on the questions at hand. Barnard reported that Goode had "no show of feeling" when asked about execution, suggesting that Goode did not have an emotional understanding of his fate. The doctor concluded that Goode had a "mental disorder of longstanding" and that in many ways he "is as a small child who can say words which seem to make some sense, but in reality he lacks appreciation of their meaning." The Florida Supreme Court denied the appeal, and Goode was electrocuted. Dr. Barnard was so troubled by the process to determine inmates' competency for execution -- including Goode's case -- that he eventually refused to serve on panels appointed by the governor to examine inmates. "I've seen (state-appointed psychiatrists) come into the prison, take 15 minutes and issue an opinion on that little bit of examination," Barnard said recently. "That was not fair." What the state tried to do to Danny Doyle is even more reprehensible. Experts believe that Doyle, convicted of raping and murdering Pamela Kipp in 1981, has a mental age of about 6 or 7 and an IQ of less than 65. A Broward County school psychologist who worked during Doyle's years in school there testified that Doyle was a "mentally retarded child who was unable to make any headway" in his classes. Prosecutors cited their own mental health experts to prove that Doyle was not retarded. As it turns out, Doyle's lawyers would later point out, one of the doctors hired by the state had previously served 6 years in federal prison for manslaughter, assault with a dangerous weapon and escape. Doyle's lawyers also produced proof that the same doctor was a prominent neo-Nazi and white supremacist who wrote an article for the NAAWP News, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of White People. In court pleadings, Doyle's attorneys quoted a Soldier Without Fortune article in which Dr. John C. McClure describes why he enjoys being an expert witness: "Sure, I love showing inkblots to dirtbags and trying to figure out why they like to rape and kill. ... Granted, I do love matching wits with the lawyers -- especially when they're paying for it. But I don't make a net contribution to justice. All I'm doing is selling jargon on the witness stand for a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour." In 1992, when Doyle's plea for mercy reached Gov. Chiles and the Cabinet, sitting as the state's clemency board, then-Insurance Commissioner Tom Gallagher worked quietly behind the scenes to craft a creative solution that would get the state out of its bind. They agreed to formally delay any action on Doyle until 2020, all but guaranteeing he would not be executed. In sweeping Doyle's case under the rug, the governor and Cabinet all but acknowledged Florida's failure to handle the issue. Former American Bar Association President Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte, now the president of Florida State University, saw that failure up close. As the lawyer who represented Doyle before the governor and Cabinet, D'Alemberte researched the inmate's medical condition and documented the checkered histories of the state-appointed experts. Says D'Alemberte: "It was all quite preposterous." Given the political realities in Tallahassee, thereis little hope of the law changing any time soon. The Florida legislature is likely to schedule a special session on the death penalty next year. Lawmakers want to adopt lethal injection as the method of execution, in case the U.S. Supreme Court declares the electric chair unconstitutional. And Gov. Bush says he wants to streamline the appeals of death row inmates. Nobody has suggested taking up the issue of the insane or retarded. When the death penalty is on the agenda in the Florida legislature, civility is checked at Tallahassee city limits. The rabid views of lawmakers such as state Rep. Howard Futch, R-Indialantic, tend to carry the day. Responding to the notion that Thomas Provenzano's mental illness leads him to believe that he is Jesus Christ, Futch quipped in a committee meeting that the state should crucify him. "I'd make him a cross, and we could take it out there to Starke and nail him up," Futch said. Politicians nationally have treated the issue with equal grace. Many Americans remember then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton's decision in 1992 to return home from the New Hampshire campaign trail to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was so retarded, and so misunderstood the nature of his punishment, that he told his lawyers as he left his cell for the death chamber that he was saving the dessert -- a slice of pecan pie -- from his final meal to eat before bed that night. In Texas, the case of a paranoid schizophrenic inmate whose illness led him to commit murder, and now faces death, could put Gov. George W. Bush in a similarly uncomfortable position. Although other states have passed laws against executing the mentally retarded -- generally drawing the line at an IQ of 70 and requiring that a person have been diagnosed before the age of 18 -- Florida lawmakers have repeatedly stymied such efforts here. The Florida Association for Retarded Citizens gave up the cause after failing for 3 straight sessions in the early 1990s. "The line that's always given back to us, and it's always in a patronizing, condescending manner from proponents of the death penalty, is that we poor people are being used by the folks who want to do away with the death penalty," said Frank Mann, the ARC lobbyist. "That's absurd. Many of us support the death penalty." As a legislator in the 1970s, Mann voted to reinstate the death penalty in Florida. The expert who helped write the laws in the states that have adopted bans on the execution of retarded inmates, University of New Mexico law professor Jim Ellis, says Florida lawmakers have a special attachment to the death penalty that blocks a thoughtful debate. Ellis, a former president of the American Association on Mental Retardation, argues that capital punishment is generally reserved for the 1 % or 2 % of murderers who deserve the most blame. Meanwhile, he says, people with mental retardation are in the bottom 2.5 % of the human population in terms of intelligence. "While that's our national consensus, the system doesn't work that way," Ellis said. Advocates are hopeful that the release in a few weeks of the Hollywood film The Green Mile, based on a 6-part serial by Stephen King about the relationship between a prison guard and an inmate with the mental capacity of a child, will raise public awareness and trigger some political support. But if there is any hope for justice, it may have to come in the courts. The best hope may come in the Texas case of Johnny Paul Penry. It was Penry's case that first brought the issue to the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court 10 years ago. Penry, who has the mental capacity of a 7-year-old, was convicted in 1980 of murder. His death sentence was eventually overturned by a sharply divided Supreme Court. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that Texas law did not allow the jury to fully consider Penry's mental state and abuse history as it weighed his case. But the court stopped short of finding that executing the mentally retarded would violate the Constitution's Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. "There is insufficient evidence of a national consensus against executing mentally retarded people convicted of capital offenses for us to conclude that it is categorically prohibited by the Eighth Amendment," O'Connor wrote. At the time, just 2 states -- Georgia and Maryland -- expressly prohibited the execution of the mentally retarded. But now some advocates think our society has evolved enough to convince the court that there is a new national standard of decency. Penry, who was resentenced to death, is preparing another appeal in federal courts that could wind up in the Supreme Court once again. Lawyers from California to Florida to Great Britain are filing "friend of the court" briefs on behalf of Penry, hoping he will once again set precedent. "We've argued that there are international standards, that other countries have standards different than ours," said Billy Edwards, a young lawyer recently hired by the Florida Capital Collateral Representative's office in Tallahassee to focus on mental health issues. He is helping to prepare a brief in the Penry case. "Now, there's definitely a national consensus." It all seems rather obvious. For years, the same public opinion polls that show a wide majority of voters supporting capital punishment also reveal a strong opposition to executing those with mental impairments -- a distaste for killing adults who are the functional equivalent of children. This is not a plea to set Freddie Lee Hall free. It is merely a call for decency.
Originally From: Beverly George Posting Date: Mon, 11 May 1998
a man with mental retardation Source: Death Penalty Information Center |
