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Why Is It So Easy for States to Execute the Mentally Ill?
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/20/mentally-ill-executed/LONG BEFORE HE COMMITTED a vicious triple murder in Houston at the age of 19, Derrick Charles had shown signs of serious mental problems. Raised amid crippling poverty, domestic abuse, alcoholism and neglect, he watched his schizophrenic mother stab his abusive stepfather. He suffered from tactile and auditory hallucinations, and by the time he was 13, had been hospitalized twice for mental illness. While in juvenile prison for nonviolent offenses, he said he was hearing voices and asked for medication. The request was denied.
Then, in July 2002, while high on marijuana laced with PCP, Charles beat and strangled his 15-year-old girlfriend, Myeshia Bennett, and her 77-year-old grandfather, Obie, then beat, strangled, and sexually assaulted Bennett’s mother, Brenda. He confessed to police, saying he didn’t know why he’d done it.
None of Charles’s lengthy and troubling history was investigated by his defense attorneys or presented at trial. Unaware of his documented mental illness — among mitigating evidence that would lessen his culpability for the crime — the Texas jury sentenced Charles to die....
The Charles case is not unique. It follows closely on the heels of other questionable executions of prisoners with mental problems. In January, the first execution of the year was Georgia’s killing of Andrew Brannan, a decorated Vietnam veteran who had been diagnosed with severe mental illness prior to his killing a deputy sheriff during a traffic stop in 1998. And in March, Missouri executed Cecil Clayton, a man who was missing 20 percent of his brain’s frontal lobe — the brain’s center for impulse control, problem solving and social behavior.
Then, in July 2002, while high on marijuana laced with PCP, Charles beat and strangled his 15-year-old girlfriend, Myeshia Bennett, and her 77-year-old grandfather, Obie, then beat, strangled, and sexually assaulted Bennett’s mother, Brenda. He confessed to police, saying he didn’t know why he’d done it.
None of Charles’s lengthy and troubling history was investigated by his defense attorneys or presented at trial. Unaware of his documented mental illness — among mitigating evidence that would lessen his culpability for the crime — the Texas jury sentenced Charles to die....
The Charles case is not unique. It follows closely on the heels of other questionable executions of prisoners with mental problems. In January, the first execution of the year was Georgia’s killing of Andrew Brannan, a decorated Vietnam veteran who had been diagnosed with severe mental illness prior to his killing a deputy sheriff during a traffic stop in 1998. And in March, Missouri executed Cecil Clayton, a man who was missing 20 percent of his brain’s frontal lobe — the brain’s center for impulse control, problem solving and social behavior.
