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On Death Row, Fate of Mentally Ill Is Thorny Problem
By GARY FIELDS
December 14, 2006; Page A1
http://online.wsj.com/article (for paid subscribers)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- At 8:30 a.m., Gregory Thompson, his hands cuffed to his
waist, has already swallowed eight of the 12 pills he takes a day.
Mr. Thompson is on death row at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution,
and like many prison inmates, he is mentally ill. In addition to his daily
drug regimen, he receives an antipsychotic injection twice a month. The
medication controls his paranoia, delusions, schizophrenia and depression.
It may also make him competent enough to be executed in the oversized wooden
chair housed in a building less than 100 yards away.
Why the 45-year-old is here isn't in dispute. On New Year's Day 1985, he
abducted Brenda Blanton Lane from a shopping-center parking lot in
Shelbyville, Tenn., while stealing her car. He fatally stabbed the
28-year-old four times in the back. The last strike had such force that the
butcher's knife he used came within millimeters of passing through her body.
He left her to die at the end of an icy dirt road.
Today, however, Mr. Thompson's case is at the center of a complex debate
about the death penalty in the U.S. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that
mentally retarded defendants and juveniles cannot be sentenced to death. Mr.
Thompson is asking the courts to decide whether mentally ill prisoners can
be executed if rendered competent only by medication. His twice-delayed
execution and similar cases are working through the judicial system; one
will likely end up in front of the high court.
There are more than 3,300 people awaiting execution in the U.S., according
to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group critical of how
the death penalty is administered. Various organizations conservatively
estimate that at least 10% of them suffer from serious mental illness. In
all, about 17% of the nation's prisoners have a diagnosis of serious mental
illness.
The Supreme Court ruled 20 years ago that federal and state authorities
could not execute defendants too insane to understand that they were about
to be killed. But states have wide latitude to determine how sane a
defendant must be in order to be executed. They can also choose to medicate
defendants to reach that point, a practice that's been outlawed in at least
three states with the death penalty. Some medical and legal groups argue
that it puts doctors in an ethical bind: having to treat people in order for
them to be killed.
Little is straightforward in these kinds of cases. "Although there is a
growing clamor to exclude the mentally ill from execution, mental illness is
not easily defined," says David Elliott, who heads the National Coalition to
Abolish the Death Penalty, a Washington, D.C., group. "With juveniles,
you're 17 or you aren't. With mental retardation, they can do tests. Mental
illness is much more complicated."
One of the most closely watched fights involves Steven Kenneth Staley, who
murdered a restaurant manager during a 1989 robbery. The Texas Court of
Appeals declined to hear his appeal recently, meaning Mr. Staley can be
forcibly medicated. No decision has been made about how his case will
proceed. Prosecutors argue that defendants could scam the system by feigning
mental illness while others might avoid execution by refusing their
medication.
Mr. Thompson, the Tennessee death-row inmate, takes Haldol, Cogentine,
lithium and Prolexin. In the late 1990s, he was forcibly medicated. In 2001,
the state requested the appointment of an official overseer to make sure Mr.
Thompson took his medication. The state says Mr. Thompson is now doing so
voluntarily. His court-appointed attorney, Dana Hansen Chavis, says that's
only because Mr. Thompson "reasonably fears for his safety if he
discontinues taking them."
"If I stop taking them, I'll end up naked and restrained again, so I take
them," says Mr. Thompson in an interview.
The state doesn't dispute that medication alone makes Mr. Thompson
competent. Rather, it argues on procedural grounds that he shouldn't be
allowed to argue the matter in court. The only issue, the state argues, is
Mr. Thompson's current mental status. His "submissions arguing for his
escape from the death penalty are of themselves evidence that he is
competent to die," the state says in its filings.
Mr. Thompson was born in Thomaston, Ga., in 1961 and from the age of five
was raised by his grandmother after his mother was killed in a car accident.
In documents filed with the court, his grandmother said she took to bed for
six weeks after her daughter's death, drinking and not caring for her three
young grandchildren. They occasionally got a meal or a can of food from
neighbors, according to court documents. Other times, they would steal money
from under the grandmother's mattress.
In 1979, Mr. Thompson graduated from Pike County High School in Georgia and
joined the Navy. It was there he began experiencing bouts of paranoia and
sudden anger, family and friends said in court testimony. He stayed in the
military until he was dishonorably discharged in 1982 after attacking a
noncommissioned officer. He returned home, worked a series of minimum-wage
jobs and became prone to screaming and bouts of unprovoked anger, his family
told the court.
During this period, he met Joanna McNamara, an unwed teenage mother. On Dec.
29, 1984, Mr. Thompson, then 24, and Ms. McNamara, then 15, traveled by bus
from Marietta, Ga., to Shelbyville, Tenn., where they stayed with a family
friend after claiming to be married. When the friend realized this wasn't
true, she reported Ms. McNamara as a runaway, according to court documents.
As Mr. Thompson waited for relatives to wire money, he began imagining Ku
Klux Klan members chasing the couple. Mr. Thompson is black, Ms. McNamara,
white. To get away, he decided to steal a car.
The pair encountered Ms. Lane on the evening of Jan. 1 as she walked to her
car in the Wal-Mart parking lot -- he picked Ms. Lane because she smiled and
spoke to him, he recalls. She'd gone there to buy aluminum foil, recalls Sue
Allison, a close friend and Ms. Lane's former boss. Ms. Lane, a newlywed,
played piano for the Sunday school, ran a church prison ministry and had
worked for several years as a local newspaper reporter.
"He chose the most gentle woman he could have found. Brenda would have given
him the car," says Ms. Allison. "Brenda was one of just a few people I knew
opposed to the death penalty."
According to testimony given at Mr. Thompson's trial, he forced Ms. Lane
into the car at knifepoint and, as she recited the Lord's Prayer, drove
around for over an hour looking for a place to leave her. He settled on a
rural area in the lightly populated Coffee County in Tennessee's
south-central region. As Ms. Lane walked away from the car, Mr. Thompson
stabbed her.
Tennessee police initially thought she might have been abducted by someone
she encountered through her prison ministry. Soon after, officials in
Georgia called to say they'd caught Ms. McNamara and Mr. Thompson. The pair
confessed and told investigators where to find Ms. Lane.
Authorities found her at 4 a.m. on Jan. 3, lying on her back at the end of a
dirt road near the entrance to a soybean field. One of her lungs had been
punctured, causing fatal internal bleeding. She remained conscious for about
10 minutes, according to the autopsy report.
Mr. Thompson's mental status has been the subject of a tangled dispute ever
since he first stood trial and was sentenced to death. The first time Mr.
Thompson's appeal traveled through the legal system, Tennessee's Supreme
Court and federal district court both noted that no evidence had been
presented proving he was mentally ill when the crime was committed. The
Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
In June 2004, when a federal appellate judge was preparing a law-review
article on the case, an intern working for him asked why none of the
mental-health experts who examined Mr. Thompson addressed his mental state
during his original trial.
The judge, Richard Suhrheinrich, studied the voluminous files and discovered
that depositions and information from a North Carolina forensic and clinical
psychology expert had been left out of the case. The expert, Faye Sultan,
diagnosed Mr. Thompson with "Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Type" and
concluded he would have been suffering from symptoms at the time he murdered
Ms. Lane.
"This mental illness would have substantially impaired Mr. Thompson's
ability to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law," Ms. Sultan
wrote in a report filed with court. Citing the missing evidence, the Sixth
Circuit appeals court reopened the case and overturned its earlier ruling.
The Supreme Court intervened at the behest of the state and ruled in 2005
that the Sixth Circuit had overstepped its authority. Justice Stephen Breyer,
in writing the dissent in the 5-4 decision, said the case "arises out of
unusual circumstances -- circumstances of a kind that I have not previously
experienced in the 25 years I have served on the bench."
Once a new execution date was set, Mr. Thompson's attorneys were allowed to
file another appeal, although this time challenging only the sentence, not
the original conviction. Nearly 22 years after the crime, his case is moving
through the courts for a second time.
Mr. Thompson is now arguing he is not competent to be executed because his
mental condition has deteriorated. His appeal also tries to make the case
that it's unconstitutional to execute a defendant made competent only
through medication.
In April, the federal district court sided with the state and found that Mr.
Thompson was competent to be executed. The district court also held that
"even if Thompson had demonstrated that the state authorities were actually
forcing him to take the medications, he has not shown that executing him in
his medicated state is unconstitutional."
The case is back with the Sixth Circuit, where Mr. Thompson is challenging
his execution on the same grounds. "Any fleeting semblance of competency is
achieved by the use of powerful medication which was initiated against
Thompson's will," his lawyers argue in a filing. Whatever the verdict, the
next step will likely be a return to the Supreme Court.
Opponents of medicating death-row inmates to make them competent argue that
the practice violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and
unusual punishments." Many groups argue that the mentally ill shouldn't face
capital charges under any circumstances. Such defendants, they argue, have
reduced ability to control their conduct and therefore less moral
culpability.
The Supreme Court has never addressed the medication question in a
capital-case ruling. It ducked the issue in the 1990s in the case of Michael
Perry, a Louisiana death-row inmate, by sending the case back to the
Louisiana Supreme Court. The state's high court decided it wouldn't force
Mr. Perry to take medication, due in part to the ethical dilemma such a move
would present to doctors. He remains on death row.
In 2003, in the case of convicted murderer Charles L. Singleton, the Supreme
Court let stand an appeals-court ruling that there is no constitutional
barrier to executing someone who is medicated. Mr. Singleton, who suffered
from schizophrenia, was being treated against his will because he was
considered a danger to himself and others. He was executed in January 2004.
The American Medical Association has tried to weave a path through this
thorny problem. It says physicians shouldn't treat an inmate to restore
competence except if medical intervention is needed to mitigate suffering,
which could also hasten an execution. The AMA acknowledges "it will not
always be easy" to decide whether or not to medicate and leaves the ultimate
decision to the treating physicians.
Mr. Thompson's appeal is the first Tennessee death-row case questioning the
validity of "chemical competency," and is taking the state into uncharted
territory.
"Our organization has not considered whether we should take a stance on this
issue," says Terrence Clark, president of the Tennessee Psychiatric
Association. Dr. Clark said his personal opinion would turn on whether he,
as a physician, is administering the medication to treat the patient's
mental illness or whether he is acting as an agent of the state to further
the execution.
Meanwhile, Mr. Thompson remains at Unit 2 at Riverbend, about four miles
from downtown Nashville. The loudest sound comes from the clanking chains
that keep Mr. Thompson's hands strapped close to his body. At 6 feet 3
inches and 263 pounds, he seems to wear the 4-by-4-foot room more than sit
in it.
In a nearby building is the death chamber, with a gurney for lethal
injections and an electric chair for electrocution. The chair is a wooden,
brown behemoth, nearly 3 feet wide, with a back nearly 6 feet high.
Plexiglas covers the seat. It hasn't been used since Nov. 7, 1960, but it
has been refurbished. Inmates who committed their crimes before Jan. 1,
1999, can request it rather than lethal injection. Mr. Thompson says he'd
prefer the chair.
With barely a blink of eyes yellowed by years of medication, Mr. Thompson
talked for nearly an hour about his life and impending death, meandering
between fact and fiction.
At one point he spoke of having his Grammy-winning career as a songwriter.
The night earlier, he said, a dog came out of the floor of his cell,
followed by a man he didn't recognize. "I didn't want to go through that,
demons and angels coming out of the walls, things on the other side of
death," he said.
He also has moments of lucidity. Mr. Thompson said he has had trouble
sleeping, but "today is a good day. Right now I'm pretty clear on what
happened." He added: "I killed her and they intend to kill me for it."
Write to Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com
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