AI Questions Executions of Mentally Ill
by TChris
A report released today by Amnesty International asks whether current constitutional caselaw is adequate to safeguard the mentally ill from execution. If it is categorically wrong to execute children or the severely retarded, is the execution of a mentally ill convict consistent with contemporary standards of decency?
If the diminished culpability associated with youth and mental retardation render the death penalty an excessive punishment when used against offenders from those categories, what about people suffering from serious mental illness or impairment other than retardation, such as serious brain damage, at the time of the crime? Should they not also be ineligible for execution?
The question is made timely by the large percentage of mentally ill offenders on death row and by the criminal justice system's emphasis on punishment, rather than treatment, of the mentally ill. Yet judges too frequently discern no constitutional barrier to killing the mentally ill.
For example, in upholding the death sentence against mentally ill inmate John Edward Weik on 3 September 2002, all five Justices on the South Carolina Supreme Court wrote: "while it violates the Eighth Amendment to impose a death sentence on a mentally retarded defendant, the imposition of such a sentence upon a mentally ill person is not disproportionate." In November 2004, two federal judges upheld the death sentence of Indiana death row inmate Arthur Baird, noting that while the US Supreme Court had prohibited the execution of offenders with mental retardation in Atkins, "it has not yet ruled out the execution of persons who kill under an irresistible impulse" brought about by mental illness.
The report makes a convincing argument against the death penalty for any offender, but its conclusion regarding the execution of the mentally ill is particularly compelling:
For the USA to be pursuing this premeditated ritualistic killing in the 21st century against offenders suffering from serious mental illness is particularly offensive to widely held standards of decency.
Go here to read a lengthy summary of the report, or here for the full 190 page report.
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