A couple of states are gearing up to kill mentally ill and mentally handicapped men:
The Southern US state of North Carolina is to kill two of the men by legal injection while Georgia, also in the South, has slated the execution of James Willie Brown for Tuesday.
Brown was found guilty of raping and murdering a woman in 1975. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia 17 times. Nevertheless, a judge determined in 1981 that he was eligible to die for his crimes.
Joseph Keel is to be executed in North Carolina November 7. He was sentenced to die in 1990 for the murder of his father-in-law. He suffers from a personality disorder stemming from multiple brain injuries, ranging from pre-natal to a workplace accident, when he was struck on the head with a 725-kilogram (1,600-pound) steel beam.
"Organic personality disorder is caused by traumatic brain injuries and is characterized by extreme mood swings, aggression, impaired judgment, apathy or paranoia and depression," the coalition said in a statement.
Another prisoner, John Dennis Daniels, was sentenced to die in 1990 for the murder of a woman. He is to die November 14, despite psychiatrists' testimony that he has the intellectual development of an 11- or 12-year-old child.
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Here we see one of the problems of the death penalty: the state is punishing actions (murder), and the actors' ability to control their actions is ignored.
The "justice" being served here seems to be simply the eradication of people who could be a threat to society.
A greater challenge faces people who support the death penalty but do not support, for one reason or another, the execution of the mentally ill: namely, how many crimes are committed by someone who actually has a sense of right and wrong, or who is fully capable of controlling his or her actions? Aren't the vast majority of people who are executed in some way incapable of understanding societal norms of right and wrong?
The entire question pulls us back to the purpose of prisons and penalties. If we wanted to reform people, if we wanted to make them productive and non-threatening members of society, we would not kill them, nor would we subject them to many of the tortures of life in prison. Since we do not do this, the assumption must be that the purpose of prison is punishment, regardless of the criminal's state of mind.
If that is true, then why don't we execute more people? What do we think prison is accomplishing? It's clearly not reforming anyone, because the entire structure of the U.S. prison system is one which promotes many of the anti-social tendencies which prisoners are supposed to avoid.
Beneath the soft fabric of everyday society lies the hard reality of prison life, and the millions of men and women who are incarcerated serve not only to bolster the prison industry itself, but to make those of us on the outside feel that we are somehow safer, that we are more righteous, that we are punishing the bad and promoting the good.
The reality is that we are killing people because we don't know what else to do with them, we are locking people up and separating them from the common humanity outside prison walls, hoping that when they return to society they will be rehabilitated, or at least scared enough of returning to prison that they behave better. Thus, we have created dark castles where our most sadistic impulses act themselves out while we go about our everyday lives, and though the outside world may be purged and purified, it is not in any way moved closer to being civilized.