SCOTUS considers dementia and the death penalty

Share:

“The eighth amendment isn’t just a window. It’s a mirror. And what the Court has said is that our norms, our values are implicated when we do things to really fragile, really vulnerable people. And what we’ve argued is that dementia in this case renders Mr. Madison frail, bewildered, vulnerable in a way that cannot be reconciled with executing him,” Equal Justice Initiative attorney Bryan Stevenson told the U.S. Supreme Court last week in his defense of Vernon Madison.

Madison has been on Alabama’s death row for 33 years, in solitary confinement, convicted of killing Mobile police officer Julius Schulte in April 1985. There is no question about his guilt, but there are serious questions about whether he should be executed, because Madison has no memory of the crime as the result of two strokes that left him with vascular dementia and long-term memory loss. He is also legally blind, cannot walk independently, and is incontinent.

His lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to addres the “urgent and compelling question about whether the Eighth Amendment permits the execution of someone with demential and acute cognitive decline.”

The state, of course, is arguing that Madison’s dementia is not severe enough to make executing him a violation of the constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. “Nothing about Mr. Madison’s conditions impact the state’s interest in seeking retribution for a heinous crime,” Assistant Alabama Attorney General Thomas Govan told the court.

You might also be interested in...

Alabama legislator introduces a bill to prohibit executions by nitrogen gas

“In states where the death penalty does exist, it shouldn’t be cruel, it shouldn’t be unusual (and) it definitely shouldn’t...
Read More

Philadelphia County exonerates another person from death row; its 13th since 1973

Fifty-four-year-old Daniel Gwynn was freed from Pennsylvania’s death row on February 29, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office announced. He served...
Read More

Oklahoma inches closer to a death penalty moratorium

Last Wednesday, the Oklahoma House Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee cleared House Bill 3138, the Death Penalty Moratorium Act, making...
Read More