Stop the Legal Killing of the Mentally Ill

Morality has been the foundation of opposition to capital punishment since it’s reinstatement in 1976. When then Governor Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions in Illinois in 2000 a vision for building a broad based coalition capable of changing public policy began to emerge.

The question of innocent people being wrongly convicted and sentenced to die became the cornerstone of mainstream discourse in evaluating capital punishment as a public policy tool.

The widespread distribution of Liebman, Fagan and West’s A Broken System: Error rates in capital cases, 1973-1995, made the unfair and unreliable administration of death penalty systems across the country the primary method by which organizers sought common ground with death penalty “agnostics.”

But perhaps a strategic moment has emerged during which an argument against the morality of state killing can rise in prominence.

Over time strategic, state-based legislative efforts and have sought to and successfully excluded whole categories of individuals from death penalty eligibility. In Tennessee the mentally retarded and juvenile offenders became categorically excluded from the death penalty over a decade ago.

In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court cited evolving standards of decency to exclude the mentally retarded in the Atkins v. Virginia decision. In October of this year a similar ruling in Roper v. Simmons could categorically exclude juvenile offenders around the country.

However, as an unintended by-product of these strategic successes the number of people with mental illness and other mental disabilities on death row has steadily increased. While precise figures are not available it is estimated that in some states 80-90% of death row inmates have diagnosed mental illness with some 5-25% suffering from serious mental illness.

In fact, persons with mental illness are disproportionately represented in correctional institutions. While about 5 percent of the U.S. population suffers from mental illness, a 1998 reported noted that “studies and clinical experience indicate that somewhere between 8 and 19 percent of prisoners have significant psychiatric or functional disabilities and another 15 to 20 percent will require some form of psychiatric intervention during their incarceration.”

This disproportionate representation has become exponential on death rows. As the pool of death penalty eligible cases has decreased, increasingly the most vulnerable amongst us have effectively become targets in a deadly game of law and order politics. Defendants who suffer from mental illnesses are most at risk in the system’s arbitrary application of death sentences.

The National Mental Health Association (NMHA) believes that mental illness can influence an individual’s mental state at the time he or she commits a crime, can affect how “voluntary” and reliable an individual’s statements might be, can compromise a person’s competence to stand trial and to waive his or her rights, and may have an effect upon a person’s knowledge of the criminal justice system.

The process of determining guilt and imposing sentence is necessarily more complex for individuals with mental illness.

Many prosecutors do nothing to help juries understand. But many people who serve on juries simply do not understand mental illness.

Even mental health employees can be mislead. In the case of Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman the prosecutor lied to MTMHI officials when asked if Abu-Ali had any history of mental illness.

Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman is diagnosed with PTSD and dissociative disorder stemming from the torturous treatment he suffered at the hands of his father as a child. He has faced 2 execution dates and may face yet another in the next 6 months. Those prosecutorial misconduct claims have yet to be heard by any court.

The NMHA believes mental illness should always be taken into account during all phases of a potential death penalty case. Moreover, the assessment of competency to stand trial as well as competency to be executed should be conducted by a multi-disciplinary team of qualified professionals, including professionals with expertise in the defendant’s particular mental illness.

The execution of those with mental illness or "the insane" is clearly prohibited by international law. In April 2000, the UN Commission on Human Rights urged all states that maintain the death penalty "not to impose it on a person suffering from any form of mental disorder; not to execute any such person."

Virtually every country in the world prohibits the execution of people with mental illness. In Ford v Wainwright (1986), the US Supreme Court determined that the Eight Amendment “prohibits the State from inflicting the death penalty upon a prisoner who is insane.” As a civilized country we should be treating the mentally ill - not killing them.

The execution of mentally ill individuals is one facet of the death penalty as public policy where moral opposition can develop enough broad-based legitimacy to grab a foothold. Killing the mentally ill should be an abhorrent practice in any civilized community.

TCASK is setting a precedent on this issue in the United States. Nationally very few people believe that this is a strategic organizing area. TCASK believes differently and is seeking to work with mental health care and social work administrators, delivery professionals, advocates, and consumers to strategize on how to stop the legal killing of the mentally ill through the public policy tool of executions.

We acknowledge that there is a major obstacle to legislative reforms. There is a huge disconnect between the medical definition of mental illness(es) and the legal definition of insanity. Bridging this gulf is a primary challenge facing opponents of killing the mentally ill. Please contact TCASK at 615-463-0700 or tcask@earthlink.net to lend you expertise to this endeavor.

The National Mental Health Association (NMHA) opposes the use of the death penalty as a form of punishment for individuals with mental illness.

The American Psychological Association (APA) calls upon each jurisdiction in the United States that imposes capital punishment not to carry out the death penalty until the jurisdiction implements policies and procedures that can be shown through psychological and other social science research to ameliorate the deficiencies identified in its 2001 resolution on the death penalty.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) believes the death penalty is never appropriate for a defendant suffering from a serious brain disorder.

In April 2000, the UN Commission on Human Rights urged all states that maintain the death penalty "not to impose it on a person suffering from any form of mental disorder; not to execute any such person."