U.S. District Court Judge Gregory M. Sleet has criticized the lack of judicial review provided by the state and federal courts prior to Delaware’s 2012 execution of Shannon Johnson, saying Johnson’s execution “highlights profound failings in our judicial process.” In an article in the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice magazine, Judge Sleet - who was Chief Judge at the time of the case - called “[t]he Johnson case, and its result, … by far the most troubling I have encountered.” Johnson confessed to the crime and sought execution by waiving his appeals. Johnson’s state court lawyer then advocated in support of his wish to be executed and opposed efforts by lawyers for Johnson’s relatives to obtain review of his mental state. Questions about Johnson’s mental competence and the state’s process for determining competence were never reviewed by any court. Sleet stayed the execution twice, expressing concerns about flaws in the state competency proceedings, but the stays were lifted by the federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. “[T]he case was and remains disturbing to me because, in the unnecessary haste to execute Johnson before his execution certificate expired — a haste arguably exacerbated by the State and the Third Circuit – I believe that the judiciary’s fundamental role of ensuring due process, as realized through an adversarial process, was sacrificed or, at the very least, undermined,” Sleet wrote. Sleet argued that Johnson’s case illustrates larger problems in the death penalty system. “[I]f one of the goals of our adversarial process is, as I believe it to be, to ‘preserve the integrity of society itself,’ we must face the fact that, in so far as the administration of the death penalty is concerned, the process is broken,” he said.

(J. Masulli Reyes and B. Horn, “Judge blasts Delaware death penalty case,” The News Journal, September 4, 2015; G. Sleet, “The Execution of Shannon Johnson,” Criminal Justice, Summer 2015.) See New Voices and Mental Illness.

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