Court: State Can Medicate Prisoner to Make Him Sane for Execution
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Arkansas can force a prisoner on death row to take antipsychotic medication to make him sane enough to execute . In the majority opinion, Judge Roger L. Wollman wrote:
"Eligibility for execution is the only unwanted consequence of the medication."The "only" unwanted consequence? Can any other consequence, good or bad, matter after that?...Judge Gerald W. Heaney, in dissent, ... would have allowed Mr. Singleton to be medicated without fear of execution.
"I believe," he wrote, "that to execute a man who is severely deranged without treatment, and arguably incompetent when treated, is the pinnacle of what Justice Marshall called `the barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance.' " Judge Heaney added that the majority's holding presented doctors with an impossible ethical choice.
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