The Florida Supreme Court reduced the death sen­tence for Ryan Green to life with­out parole because he suf­fered from schiz­o­phre­nia and was not able to ful­ly appre­ci­ate the con­se­quences of his actions. Green was sen­tenced to death in 2006 for the mur­der of a retired Pensacola police sergeant. The jury that con­sid­ered his case vot­ed 10 – 2 for death. The pre­sid­ing judge, who makes the sen­tenc­ing deci­sion in Florida, imposed a death sen­tence despite his con­clu­sion that in the time lead­ing up to the crime Green was in a ​“psy­cho­log­i­cal, emo­tion­al and anti-social free fall into an abyss” and ​“ful­ly immersed in a drown­ing pool of men­tal ill­ness.” The Supreme Court over­turned the sen­tence find­ing sub­stan­tial and uncon­tro­vert­ed evi­dence of the defen­dan­t’s mental illness.

At his tri­al, Green tes­ti­fied that before he shot the offi­cer he shot a bull, and that the ani­mal had stood up and said, ​“I love you.” Green then approached the offi­cer, who was out for a walk near his home and asked for direc­tions. The let­ter ​“A” on the offi­cer’s University of Alabama ball cap was, to Green, the sign of the Antichrist, he tes­ti­fied. ​“Green tes­ti­fied that God moti­vat­ed him to kill Hallman,” the court wrote. ​“He felt God put him there, on that day, to kill Hallman because Hallman was the Antichrist.”
(Pensacola News Journal, Jan. 31, 2008). See Mental Illness.

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