Amnesty International just released a report describing the problems concerning the execution of the mentally ill in America.
The summary of the report can be found here.
The full report is here.
I cannot believe that capital punishment is a solution - to abolish murder by murdering, an endless chain of murdering. When I heard that my daughter's murderer was not to be executed, my first reaction was immense relief from an additional torment: the usual catastrophe, breeding more catastrophe, was to be stopped - it might be possible to turn the bad into good. I felt with this man, the victim of a terrible sickness, of a demon over which he had no control, might even help to establish the reasons that caused his insanity and to find a cure for it...
Mother of 19-year-old murder victim, California, November 1960
The report mentions that 1 in 10 of the executions in the United States were of people who were severely mentall ill.
Those are just the people who had a history of mental illness before they committed their crimes.
Many others from among the remaining over 900 executed prisoners have raised mental health issues, either at trial or on appeal. However, it is not possible to know how many people who had serious mental impairments are on death row or have been executed. Defence lawyers may not have recognized that their clients had mental problems. Many inmates have not had thorough mental health examination because of lack of funds to allow such assessments.
There are two problems raised here. 1) We do not deal with the serioulsy mentally ill in America very well. 2) Our legal system does not allow for a reasonable way to deal with these people.
Again, we see the inherent problems with our legal system writ large. Those who are least capable of providing for themselves a credible defense are more likely to get the death penalty. The mentally ill cannot get good health care, and furthermore, they are likely to not be able to afford a good lawyer.
Some have chosen to defend themselves, not knowing what they were doing and not knowing the consequences of their actions.
In many cases, the mentally ill are incapable of making reasonable decisions about there lives. They may not have any understanding about what they've done and why it is wrong. This inability to make reasonable decisions affects their choices about committing crimes and makes it highly likely that they will not be able to defend themselves in a court of law.
Furthermore, as the report states, the Supreme Court has left the tests of competency up to the states. This leaves us with some states having different tests as applies to mental impairment of any kind. At best this is problematic. At worst, it allows states to come up with arbitrary definitions of impairment. Some states make the definitions of mental impairment impossibly difficult to meet.
The Supreme Court has, at least, decided that the mentally retarded and children cannot be executed. But the court has also said that the mentally ill are not allowed that same exemption.
Are the mentally ill any less culpable then the mentally retarded and children?
I'll leave you with another quote from the report. You should read the summary at least.
While mental retardation and mental illness are not the same, the Atkins ruling nevertheless could be applied to the latter. For example, a mentally ill person's delusional beliefs may cause them to engage in illogical reasoning and to act on impulse. A former President of the American Psychiatric Association wrote following the Atkins decision:
"From a biopsychosocial perspective, primary mental retardation and significant Axis 1 disorders have similar etiological characteristics. And the mentally ill suffer from many of the same limitations that, in Justice Stevens' words, `do not warrant an exemption from criminal sanctions, but they do diminish their personal culpability".(3)
Only a tiny percentage of murders in the USA result in execution. The death penalty is a punishment in the United States that is supposed to be reserved for the "worst of the worst" crimes and offenders. In a decision in 1980, for example, the US Supreme Court overturned a death sentence because the defendant's murders had not shown "a consciousness materially more `depraved' that that of any person guilty of murder". The Atkins decision picked up on this and stated: "If the culpability of the average murderer is insufficient to justify the most extreme sanction available to the State, the lesser culpability of the mentally retarded offender surely does not merit that form of retribution."
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