Medicating the Mentally Ill to Execute Them

What does the state of Texas do when it has a death row inmate who's too mentally ill to be aware that he is going to be put to death? Does it follow the 1986 ruling of the Supreme Court which forbade such conduct as "cruel and unusual punishment" or does it just figure out some legal way to circumvent the law?

The answer, unfortunately, is the latter:

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- A judge who halted an execution because the inmate was mentally ill has agreed to force the man to take anti-psychotic medication so he can be put to death.

The inmate, Steven Kenneth Staley, 43, has refused to take his medication. A jury decided he should be put to death for the killing of a Fort Worth restaurant manager during a botched robbery.

How did Staley end up on death row?

Ten days after Staley was released from prison for a another conviction, the Department of Corrections warned Staley was "an extrmely[sic] poor parole risk" and would need mental - health treatment, alcohol and drug treatment, and close supervision. However, Staley was relased[sic] from prison to a halfway house.

While at the center he violated many rules and was often missing. The night before Staley escaped from the Center and immidiately[sic] before he committed the crime, he reportedly told the center he needed to be returned to prison because he knew he was violent.

Staley already had a long history of violent crime. The state knew he was ill, knew he needed mental health treatment and, even though he was at a high risk to re-offend, it put him back out on the streets. His co-defendants received a 30 year sentence and 3 life sentences as a result of plea bargains.

Staley's lawyer had this to say about the forced medication of his client:

"The whole idea of holding somebody down and injecting them so that we can then say, with a straight face, this person is now competent so we can kill them, I think that smacks of an Orwellian-Soviet-style approach to criminal justice," Jack Strickland told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

No doubt.

In related news:

The Texas Moratorium Network has organized a campaign to oppose H.R. 3035, the "Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005" "because it will decrease safeguards against false imprisonment or execution and increase the risk that an innocent person will be executed".

You can send an e-mail stating your opposition (available for Canadians and Americans) by following the above link.

Senator Russ Feingold spoke against this bill in 2005.

Amnesty International provides more research on the fate of the mentally ill on death row, including the case of Willie Brown in North Carolina who is scheduled to be executed on April 21, 2006. They have also provided an online form letter that you can send to the North Carolina governor, Michael Easley, to request clemency on his behalf.

Whether or not you believe the death penalty is a just punishment (which I do not), surely the issue of states continuing to execute the mentally ill which was forbidden by the Supreme Court has to be a seriously troubling issue for anyone with a conscience, especially when states that do so have not provided proper mental health treatment to those they had previously incarcerated, such as Mr Staley.

How can it possibly be considered rational by anyone that a death row inmate be medicated only to ensure that he knows he is going to die? On the scale of man's inhumanity to man, that decision rates very near the top of the most utterly unjustifiable of actions.

Please take action today to stop the insanity of these judges and state officials. If only they could be similarly medicated so they could actually understand the sick reality of their decisions. That, however, is against the law as well.