Commentary: Who does America execute? A lot of people with mental illness and brain traumas
The Daily WorldDec 18, 2018
By
It's been apparent for years that the American death penalty system is so deeply and irredeemably flawed that it should not be used to determine whether someone should die for a crime. It's prone to manipulation by prosecutors and police, witnesses get details wrong (intentionally and not), and the penalty is applied disproportionately on minorities and the poor.
But a new report by the
The organization, which released its annual year-end overview early Friday morning, reports that of 25 executions in 2018 —a near-record low for the modern era —at least 11 of the condemned displayed "significant evidence of mental illness." Further, at least nine showed "evidence of brain injury, developmental brain damage, or an IQ in the intellectually disabled range" and at least 11 had suffered "chronic serious childhood trauma, neglect, and/or abuse." Many of the executed fell into more than one category.
Of the 25 executed men, six — or about 25 percent —were age 21 or younger when they committed the crimes for which they were sentenced to death. There is growing consensus among experts that the rational part of the human brain doesn't fully mature until age 25 or so.
So we're killing people who were immature at the time of their crimes, or who were mentally ill at the time of their execution (and often at the time of the crime), or who had learning and other cognitive disabilities.
Yes, murder is a horrific crime, resonating far beyond the victim. It is deserving of harsh punishment. But do the mentally ill deserve to be executed for acts they may not have understood? Or whose rational culpability is weighted by cognitive disabilities? And who were at a disadvantage in helping their attorneys defend them?
Death rows are packed with people whose illnesses and disabilities were significant factors in their crimes. The
Here in
A federal judge ruled in 2007 that McPeters was too mentally ill to be executed, and the state attorney general's office has joined with McPeters' lawyers to ask the state Supreme Court to commute his sentence to life in prison because it would be unconstitutional to kill him.
Yet because of court backlogs, McPeters still sits on death row along with more than two dozen other condemned inmates who, like him, are probably too mentally ill to be executed. One,
At least here in
Capital punishment is an immoral practice that the nation has proved time and again that it can't get right, from exonerations (four from