Paul Reid

A case of long-term, severe mental illness

Paul Dennis Reid has a long history of mental illness. Reid has been diagnosed with schizophrenia - paranoid type as well as schizoaffective disorder and left temporal lobe dysfunction. The latter, according to neuropsychiatrist George Woods, “has produced in Mr. Reid a chronic, schizophrenia-like psychosis which has severely impaired his ability to weigh, deliberate, inform, and cooperate.”

In fact, every independent medical expert who has examined Reid in recent years has found him to be delusional.

Reid is scheduled for execution because he dropped the appeals of his conviction for the 1997 murder of Angela Holmes and Michelle Mace whom he kidnapped from a Clarksville Baskin Robbins. Reid’s sister, Linda Martiniano, has filed a petition as a “next friend” because he is not competent to make the decision to drop his appeals. Martiniano said that her brother "is severely mentally ill. He does not think or act in a rational manner. It seems that everything he does is guided by his belief in a government conspiracy against him to bombard him with ‘scientific technology’. When he has talked about giving up appeals and being executed, he talks about ending the torture of the scientific technology.”

Reid’s psychosis is long-standing and deep. He was found to be incompetent in Texas courts twice, more than two decades ago. As a result of these findings, he spent an extended period of time in a psychiatric correctional facility. Yet the state of Tennessee has continually moved to execute him, whether or not he properly understands the situation or is able to make rational decisions and assist in his own defense.

Reid believes that he is the target of surveillance and abuse by the “military government” which has manipulated his life and decisions since the 1980s. He writes that since 1985, “most every person who has any type of association or contact with me, usually first has to go through the military government.” This includes, according to Reid, his attorneys, who he believes are under the control of the military government, and nearly every other person he has ever met. He believes that the “military government” has been using him as a lab rat, denying him success to try to force him to commit crimes. Without this interference, Reid says, he would have several law degrees, practice in a huge Houston firm, have a beautiful wife, and be rich. He even believes that the government possesses surveillance tapes that would exonerate him, but that it refuses to release them.

Reid’s mental state also causes perceptual and memory impairments. He believes that many conversations are “repeats”, that they have happened before, when they clearly have not. Reid’s inability to accurately and consistently recall events makes it impossible for him to aid in his own defense, make rational decisions, or provide accurate information to his lawyers. For example, Reid believes that a court hearing in Nashville was a repeat of an imagined hearing from a previous year. These are classic examples of a disorganized symptom cluster.

Yet Reid maintains, as do half of all persons diagnosed with schizophrenia, that he is completely mentally well and that his delusions are real, despite undeniable evidence to the contrary. In writing to the Governor and the Tennessee Supreme Court he has referred to attempts by his attorneys to present such evidence as a character assault against him. His attorneys are, according to Reid, attempting to make him appear “demented.”

Before this conviction Reid had already been sentenced to death for two other murders at a fast food restaurant in Nashville in 1997, and in 2000 would be sentenced to death for three other murders that took place at a Nashville McDonald’s that same year.

Reid’s case is sadly not unique. 10% of death row inmates suffer from mental illness while half of the general prison population reports having experience mental illness at some time. In Paul Reid’s case, as in the case of so many others, proper mental health treatment was never made available and the person sadly succumbed to their disease and perpetrated a horrible crime.

The question that must be asked is, are the mentally ill like Paul Reid, who, when properly treated, are unlikely to pose a threat to society, the people that we should be executing? The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), the National Mental Health Association (NMHA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) all oppose the execution of the mentally ill.

TCASK expresses the deepest sympathy for the pain suffered by all family members affected by these truly tragic killings. However, to execute a person who is so clearly mentally ill, suffering from paranoid delusions and unable to assist in his own defense, violates our deepest sense of morality. To quote former NAMI-TN executive director Joyce Judge, “We should be treating the mentally ill, not killing them.”