Supreme Court ruling spares inmates with severe dementia from death penalty
February 28, 2019
MitchellShapiroPhotography / CCL
The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that inmates suffering from dementia cannot be put to death if their symptoms are so severe that they cannot comprehend the reasons for their punishment.
Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with the court’s liberal justices that state and federal courts must determine if a death row prisoner understands why they are going to be executed.
Speaking for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan explained the 5-to-3 decision: “If a person suffering from any mental disorder — dementia included — is unable to rationally understand why the state wants to execute him, then the Eighth Amendment doesn’t allow the execution.”
Cruel and unusual punishment
With the justices’ decision, Alabama death-row inmate Vernon Madison will be afforded another opportunity to convince a lower court that a series of strokes and worsening vascular dementia have made it impossible to remember why the state wishes to execute him. Madison was convicted for the 1985 murder of Mobile police officer Julius Schulte.
Due to the slow pace of the criminal appellate process, many inmates are old men and women by the time their executions are carried out. Every death row case undergoes a meaningful appeal to ensure that all avenues are exhausted to guarantee that an innocent defendant is not put to death.
“There are many, many, many prisoners on death row under threat of execution who are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, possibly 80s, who have been there for 20, 30, 40 years, perhaps,” Justice Stephen Breyer said. “So this will become a more common problem.”
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High stakes judgment
Previously, the Supreme Court ruled that inmates suffering from chronic delusions associated with schizophrenia and psychosis could not be executed because doing so would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The justices determined that there is no “retributive value” in executing someone who does not understand the meaning of society’s judgment and that it “simply offends humanity” to put someone to death who can’t understand the crime they committed or the punishment they must endure.
Madison spent 33 years in solitary confinement before suffering from health problems in the latter stages of his life. His attorneys insist that he can no longer recall the day of the week or the current season, and that he can only recite the alphabet up to the letter “G.”
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If reminded, Madison knows that he will be executed for the 1985 homicide of a police officer. However, his lawyers insist that the 68-year-old forgets his impending death every day and has to be repeatedly reminded of his status as a death row inmate.
Crime and punishment
Initially, Madison’s attorneys focused on the specific question of whether their client could be executed for a crime he no longer remembered, and the Supreme Court accepted the case based on this premise. However, the court’s conservative judges, led by Justice Samuel Alito, accused the defense of switching tactics and persuading the court to focus on Madison’s dementia once they realized they were getting nowhere with their original strategy.
Indeed, the court dismissed the defense’s claim that an inmate must remember their crime to be executed for it. “A person lacking memory of his crime may yet rationally understand why the state seeks to execute him; if so, the Eighth Amendment poses no bar to his execution,” Kagan wrote.
In his dissenting opinion, Alito accused Madison’s defense of “making a mockery of our rules” by completely changing course and arguing that their client should be spared because he didn’t know why he was being punished. “The majority rewards counsel’s trick,” Alito wrote.
In response, Kagan said that Alito’s “high dudgeon” was unwarranted, insisting that the defense “presented two questions — the same two we address here.”
Madison won’t necessarily be spared the death penalty with the Supreme Court’s ruling. His case will return to the Alabama state court system, where his lawyers will have to convince the judge that Madison does, in fact, suffer from the symptoms of dementia.
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