Executing Inmate With Dementia Is Unconstitutional, Says APA

Capital punishment of an individual with vascular dementia who cannot recall the crime for which he is being punished violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

So said APA in an amicus curiae brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments in the case Madison v. Alabama last month. Supreme Court decisions are typically rendered in the spring, but it is possible the court could decide sooner.

APA was joined in the brief by the American Psychological Association.

Vernon Madison was imprisoned for the murder of a Mobile, Ala., police officer in 1985. After several mistrials, he was convicted in 1994. The jury recommended life in prison rather than capital punishment based on evidence presented at the trial that he had severe mental illness, but an Alabama circuit judge overrode the jury and imposed a death sentence.

Madison was originally scheduled to be executed in May 2016, and he challenged his competency in state court. The court denied his claim, and Madison then sought relief in federal court. The Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found that he was incompetent to be executed.

In November 2017, the Supreme Court reversed that decision on the basis of criteria in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). Madison was rescheduled for execution in January 2018 but again petitioned state court for relief, this time with new evidence that the court-appointed expert upon whose testimony the prior courts relied had been suspended from the practice of psychology.

The court again denied his petition, finding Madison competent to be executed. Madison then asked the Supreme Court to consider the constitutional issues underlying his claim, rather than the AEDPA ones it ruled on earlier.

The amicus brief draws on two Supreme Court decisions—the 1986 case Ford v. Wainwright and the 2007 case Panetti v. Quarterman—to argue that executing Madison would violate the Eighth Amendment. “[B]ased on the common law and this Court’s precedent, it is cruel and unusual punishment to execute an individual with severe vascular dementia—a disease for which there is no cure and which often causes debilitating cognitive impairments of the type that afflict Mr. Madison.”

“In both cases, the Court looked to the common law and the underlying humanitarian concerns implicated in executing an individual whose mental illness precludes a rational understanding of his punishment,” the brief continues. In Ford, for example, the court ruled that executing an insane person “simply offends humanity”; that doing so “provides no example to others and thus contributes nothing to whatever deterrence value is intended to be served by capital punishment”; and that it is “uncharitable to dispatch an offender into another world, when he is not of a capacity to fit himself for it.”

In Panetti, the court questioned “the retributive value of executing a person who has no comprehension of why he has been singled out and stripped of his fundamental right to life” and cited “the natural abhorrence civilized societies feel at killing one who has no capacity to come to grips with his own conscience or deity.”

The brief also explained that mental health experts can “assist courts in identifying prisoners with severe dementia through the use of modern brain imaging, standardized clinical assessments, and instruments to detect malingering.” ■

APA’s friend-of-the-court briefs can be accessed here.