- U.S. District Court Stays Olen Hutchison Execution -
Attorney General Paul Summers’ Office Out of Step
state targets mentally ill – seeks to execute 2 More
Nashville – On Thursday January 22nd Judge James H. Jarvis of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee stayed the execution of Tennessee death row inmate Olen Hutchison. Hutchison was facing a March 11 execution date. Judge Jarvis passed Hutchison’s 60(b) filing on to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals where it will wait for a decision in the pending appeal of Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman on the same issue.
This marks the 8th consecutive execution date in Tennessee that has been stopped since the execution of Robert Glen Coe in 2000. Coe is the only person Tennessee has executed in nearly 44 years.
Cast against this backdrop a lone wolf can be seen flexing the weak muscles of the politics of fear. Tennessee Attorney General Paul Summers remains woefully out of step with the trends sweeping across the political landscape of the United States.
“Attorney General Paul Summers’ office continues its efforts to swim against the tide of public opinion and the general public’s growing concern about the way the death penalty is applied in this country,” said Randy Tatel, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing. “With Paul House (Union County) and Michael McCormick (Hamilton County) likely to be exonerated this year, Summers’ should be acting cautiously in response to these egregious wrongful convictions.”
The death penalty continued its national attrition in 2003 with executions, death sentences and the death row population all lower. Public support has also dropped to its lowest level in 25 years. At the same time, death row exonerations in 2003 have driven legislative reforms around the country.
But Summers has floored the accelerator to the state’s death penalty machinery and is seeking the execution of the diagnosed mentally ill in two more cases. Summers asked for and received a June 3rd execution date for Sedley Alley. Alley’s attorneys said that he “likely would be incompetent to be executed.”
Now Summers has inexplicably asked the Supreme Court to set a date for Gregory Thompson. Just three years ago, this same state official, Tennessee Attorney General Paul Summers, requested "that a court appoint a conservator to Gregory Thompson because his mental illness rendered him incompetent."
"The state seeks to execute a man they admit is insane," Thompson's
attorney, Dana C. Hansen, Assistant Federal Community Defender with the Federal
Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee stated. "The request for a conservator
and forced medication basically said that Mr. Thompson is so mentally ill he
can't even decide for himself whether or not he needs to take an aspirin. That
the state is now seeking to execute Mr. Thompson is inhumane, uncivilized,
and hypocritical."
Inhumane, uncivilized and hypocritical – three poignant words to describe
the recent actions of the state’s Attorney General’s office. It
is apparent that the overall action by the state, these past three years, has
been to insure that Thompson is competent to be executed by forcibly medicating
him, "making him chemically competent to be executed."
In October of last year Williamson County prosecuted Richard Taylor after doctors at the Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute forced Taylor to take anti-psychotic medication so that he could be declared “competent” to stand trial.
“The death penalty system under Attorney general Paul Summers is predatory, preying upon the weak and vulnerable,” said Tatel. “The politically conservative position to take in the context of wrongful convictions, constitutional questions, severe mental illness would be to support a ‘time-out’ – a moratorium on executions – while we study a system that 6th Circuit Appelate Judge Gilbert Merritt called ‘still broken’ despite years of reform.”
“But Summers is not only out of step – he’s out of control. He’s like a shark that has sniffed a single drop of blood and his appetite for more appears insatiable,” concluded Tatel.
