Mental Illness and the Death Penalty

The Tuscon Citizen published an article about the never-ending problems with the Death Penalty.

Lately there have been stories in the news about people that were given the death penalty(capital punishment) and executed only to find out later through modern DNA testing that the wrong person was killed. That in and of itself is enough to give pause before taking some one’s life for a crime, but what about when the person is seriously mentally ill and symptomatic when a crime is committed?

Amnesty International believes that “The death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights. It is the premeditated and cold-blooded killing of a human being by the state in the name of justice. It violates the right to life…It is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. There can never be any justification for torture or for cruel treatment.”

What's your opinion? Is Amnesty International right when they say the "death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights?" I certainly think so.

At the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) annual convention in San Francisco last summer families of murder victims joined with families of persons with mental illness who have been executed to speak out against the death penalty.

Double Tragedies, a report released at the convention, calls the death penalty “inappropriate and unwarranted” for people with severe mental disorders and “a distraction from problems within the mental health system that contributed or even directly lead to tragic violence.”

Please leave a comment.

Troy Davis Gets Another Stay

CNN reports that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay of execution Friday for a Georgia death row inmate who had been scheduled to die on Monday. We discussed this case before here and here. Several things came out in those discussions, like the oft-repeated epithet cop-killer, as if that makes the crime worse, the fact that the stays come sometimes only days or hours before the appointment with the needle, the fact that the victim's family wants "it over," and of course the fact that in this case with so many witnesses recanting, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out there might be an injustice in the making.

Amnesty International Executive Director Larry Cox said in a written statement that the organization was "heartened" to hear of the stay of execution.

"Until this point, the compelling issues in this case have been virtually ignored, leaving Georgia vulnerable to the possibility of killing an innocent man."

On the very interesting site called Death Power we read someone who is not afraid to say simply and clearly what his opinion is. It's captured well in the post title, Thank Goodness - Troy Davis Execution put on hold again.

What do you think? Do I sound unsympathetic towards the victim and his family because I'm trying to support Troy Davis? I'm not unsympathetic really. The questions in this post have little to do with the victim, the murder victim. They have to do with the convicted murderer. Did he get a fair trial? Is it a type of political spinning to call him a cop-killer? Is the victim's family interested in justice or vengeance? Would an execution satisfy them?