A state district judge withdrew the April 5 execution warrant for Andre Thomas earlier this month to give Thomas’s lawyers time to prepare for a hearing to determine his mental competency.
Thomas’s lawyer, Maurie Levin, immediately issued a statement hailing the judge’s order.
“The Court’s order gives Mr. Thomas the time necessary to make the threshold showing that his lifelong, profound mental illness, characterized by fixed auditory and visual hallucinations, distorts everything he says, thinks, and does, and he is not competent for execution.
He has endured a profound and lifelong mental illness that fundamentally distorts his perception of reality and causes incessant auditory and visual hallucinations. We are confident that when we present the evidence of Mr. Thomas’s incompetence, the court will agree that executing him would violate the Constitution.
Guiding this blind psychotic man to the gurney for execution offends our sense of humanity and serves no legitimate purpose. Mr. Thomas will remain confined, as he has been, and the public will be kept safe.”
For the past 15 years, Thomas, 39, has been at the state psychiatric facility, where Texas houses imprisoned men and women with the most extreme mental illness. Thomas, who has severe schizophrenia, permanently blinded himself by gouging out both eyes, the first one five days after his arrest, the second, which he then ate, was in 2008.
Throughout his life, Thomas sought treatment for his severe mental illness symptoms, including up to two days before the murders of his estranged wife, Laura Boren, his four-year-old son, and her one-year-old daughter in Sherman, Texas, in 2004.
No one responded to his increasingly desperate pleas for help, and the jury that sentenced him to death never heard about the lifelong and extreme nature of his illness or his repeated attempts to get treatment.
