Hundreds of Mentally Ill to Be Executed in America: Amnesty

Hundreds of Mentally Ill to Be Executed in America: Amnesty

What happened to my country?

WASHINGTON - Amnesty International is asking that hundreds of mentally ill people facing the death penalty in American prisons have their sentences commuted.

Ten percent of the first 1,000 people executed in the United States since 1977 suffered from illnesses ranging from schizophrenia to post-traumatic stress disorder and brain damage, the leading rights watchdog and opponent of capital punishment said in a report released Tuesday.

Instead of receiving the care they desperately need, hundreds of severely mentally ill offenders in the United States are mired within a health care system that is too slow to help and a justice system that is too quick to push them into the death chamber.

Another 3,400 people remain on death row and 5-10 percent of them have mental illnesses, Amnesty said, citing estimates by the National Institute of Mental Health.
The revelations coincided with hearings Wednesday in which U.S. senators heard about the death penalty from relatives of crime victims.

Ann Scott, whose daughter was sexually assaulted and murdered in 1991, likened the killer to an animal and said he should be ''put away.''

''I, me, want this bully gone. I want him to disappear off the face of this earth. I want him to rot in hell for eternity,'' she was quoted in a news report as saying of her daughter's murderer, Alfred Mitchell. ''He is a bad seed that never should have been born. He is an animal and when you have an animal that attacks people, you take it to the pound and have it put away.''

Vicki Schieber, whose daughter Shannon was raped and murdered in 1998, disagreed and told the Senate panel she did not want her daughter's killer to be executed.

''Responding to one killing with another killing does not honor my daughter, nor does it help create the kind of society I want to live in, where human life and human rights are valued,'' she said. ''I know that an execution creates another grieving family, and causing pain to another family does not lessen my own pain.''

Her daughter's killer, Troy Graves, was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole.
The Amnesty report and Senate hearings reflect increasing scrutiny of the death penalty in the United States.

Last October, a Gallup poll said that 64 percent of Americans favored the death penalty--still nearly two-thirds of the population but the lowest level in 27 years. Approval of the death penalty peaked at 80 percent in 1994, Gallup said.

Amnesty, in its report, urged an immediate moratorium on all executions involving the mentally ill.
The inmates in question suffered ''serious mental impairment'' either before or while they committed their crimes, Amnesty said, adding that their execution stood at odds with a 2002 Supreme Court ruling that it is unconstitutional to execute criminals who are mentally retarded.

Only one state--Connecticut--bars execution for convicts found to have been mentally ill when they committed their crime. Texas is the top executioner of mentally impaired people, killing at least 24 retarded or mentally ill people since 1977. Oklahoma killed the next largest number of mentally ill people, nine, among the cases studied by Amnesty.

''The safety net currently in place to prevent individuals with long, documented histories of severe mental illness from committing violent crimes or to protect them from being executed when they do is egregiously inadequate,'' the group said.

''Instead of receiving the care they desperately need, hundreds of severely mentally ill offenders in the United States are mired within a health care system that is too slow to help and a justice system that is too quick to push them into the death chamber,'' it added.

Amnesty said a review of psychiatric examinations, medical records, and documented cases of extreme behavior found that at least 100 of the condemned prisoners had severe mental illness. In other cases, it was impossible to determine if the inmates suffered from mental illness because a thorough psychiatric examination had never been done.

Mentally ill defendants were allowed to conduct their own defenses, waive their rights to appeal, and ''volunteer'' to be executed, the rights organization added.

More than one-fourth of the 100 mentally ill prisoners executed since 1977, when the Supreme Court lifted a 10-year moratorium on capital punishment, had thus agreed to be killed--sometimes because they simply would not accept that they were mentally impaired but also because they had given up hope of receiving treatment, said the report, The Execution of Mentally Ill Offenders.

''In some cases, families begged the state for help with their mentally ill loved ones only to be told that nothing could be done until the relative became 'dangerous','' Amnesty said. ''Unfortunately, the next time the families heard from the state authorities was when the person for whom they had sought help was being arrested and charged with murder.''

Many trials never heard any evidence of mental illness, the report said, and U.S. prosecutors exploited public ignorance or fear about mental illness by arguing that mentally ill defendants' ''flat'' behavior in court indicated they were ''unremorseful.''

The report cited the case of Scott Panetti, sentenced to death in 1995 for killing his parents-in-law. Panetti, who had been hospitalized repeatedly with hallucinations, represented himself in court, where he dressed as a cowboy and asked irrational questions. His case is under appeal.

Other defendants had been medicated so that they would be lucid enough to be aware of what was happening to them at the time of their execution.

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