The Texas authorities should commute the death sentence of a prisoner
assessed as having a mental disability but facing execution in under a
week, Amnesty International said today.
Marvin Wilson, a 54-year-old African American man, is due to be put
to death by lethal injection on 7
August for a murder committed in 1992.
A clinical neuropsychologist has concluded that he has “mental
retardation”.
A decade ago, in Atkins v. Virginia, the
US Supreme Court prohibited the execution of offenders with “mental
retardation”, but left it up to the individual states as to how to
comply with the ruling.
“While a majority of countries have
stopped executing anyone, let alone people with mental disabilities, the
USA continues to buck this global trend, with Texas all too often
leading the way,” said Rob Freer, Amnesty International’s USA
Researcher.
“And leaving it up to Texas how to comply with the Atkins ruling appears to have been something akin to leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse.”
Before
the Atkins ruling, Texas executed more inmates diagnosed with “mental
retardation” than any other state. A decade on, its legislature has yet
to enact a law to comply with Atkins, and there are fears that
“temporary” guidelines developed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
(TCCA) in 2004 are letting the state execute offenders who should be
exempted from this punishment under the Constitution.
In 2003, Wilson’s lawyers filed an “Atkins claim”
to challenge the constitutionality of his death sentence. They
presented the courts with the detailed conclusions of a court-appointed
neuropsychologist with 22 years of clinical experience who assessed
Wilson as meeting the criteria for mental retardation.
The state
of Texas has presented no expert testimony to rebut that evidence, but
state courts nonetheless rejected the Atkins claim applying the TCCA’s
much-criticized guidelines. The federal courts, required under US law to
give a high level of deference to state court rulings, upheld the
denial. Wilson’s lawyers are seeking US Supreme Court intervention on
his case and to have the Court examine what is going on in Texas on this
issue.
The last federal court to rule on the case – the US Court
of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 2011 – acknowledged that “other
fact-finders might reach a different conclusion as to whether Wilson is
mentally retarded on the evidence” that had been presented before the
state court.
“Surely that acknowledgement alone should make the Texas clemency authorities pause for thought,” said Freer.
“This
is an irrevocable penalty and here is a federal court effectively
saying that Wilson’s execution could be assessed as unconstitutional if
put to another set of ‘fact-finders’. If nothing else, caution demands
commutation.”
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty
unconditionally in all cases. This is a cruel, unnecessary and
dehumanizing punishment that in the USA is riddled with discrimination,
inconsistency and error.
This would be the seventh execution in
Texas this year, as the state heads for its 500th execution since
resuming judicial killing 30 years ago.
Nationwide, 1,301 people
have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977,
including 24 this year. Since resuming executions in December 1982,
Texas accounts for 483, or more than a third, of the total.
Source : http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/usa-texas-man-due-be-executed-despite-evidence-mental-disability-2012-08-03