New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty (NYADP) strongly objects to yesterday's ruling by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals permitting the State of Arkansas to forceably medicate death row prisoner Charles Laverne Singleton to make him sane enough to execute.
"Medicine is supposed to heal people," said NYADP Executive Director David Kaczynski, "not prepare them for execution. A law that asks doctors to make people well so that the government can kill them is an absurd law."
David Kaczynski is the brother of Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, who killed three people and injured more than a dozen others in a series of bombings over 17 years. Theodore was arrested after David took his suspicions to the FBI after reading the Unabomber's manifesto in the Washington Post. Federal prosecutors initially sought the death penalty for Theodore but settled for a life sentence after a federal Bureau of Prisons psychiatrist diagnosed Theodore with schizophrenia.
The American Medical Association's ethical guidelines forbids giving medical treatment that would make people competent to be executed and also prohibits physicians from participating directly in executions. The New York State Psychiatric Association has called for a moratorium on executions in New York State.
According to David Kaczynski, "There's nothing in New York's death penalty law that would prohibit the execution of someone suffering from serious mental illness. After all, the Court of Appeals refused to overturn Ralph Tortoricci's sentence despite a ton of evidence that he was profoundly schizophrenic." Ralph Tortoricci was sentenced in Albany District Court to a long prison term after he seriously wounded a student in a shooting incident at SUNY/Albany. He later committed suicide in prison and last fall his story became the focus of an expose on mental illness and the criminal justice system on PBS' "Frontline" series.
Mr. Kaczynski added, "The fact that Mr. Singleterry is now insane makes you wonder if he wasn't also insane when he committed the crime. Whether we're talking about low standards for defense attorneys or about biased expert witnesses, the system is broken in so many ways that it can't seem to put two and two together."
