In his final arti­cle for 2006, colum­nist Richard Cohen chose to high­light the ​“mad­ness of the death penal­ty” and to draw atten­tion to the exe­cu­tion of those with men­tal ill­ness. Cohen used the case of Gregory Thompson, a severe­ly men­tal­ly ill Tennessee death row inmate, to illus­trate some of the broad­er prob­lems with the death penal­ty.

Thompson is delu­sion­al, para­noid, schiz­o­phrenic, and depressed. He takes 12 pills every day and receives twice-month­ly anti-psy­chot­ic injec­tions. Cohen notes that although there is no doubt about his guilt, there is grave doubt ​“about the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty, not to men­tion the decen­cy, of exe­cut­ing an insane man.… The idea, accord­ing to a recent account of his case in the Wall Street Journal, is to make him sane enough to be put to death.” Cohen voic­es con­cern about a broad range of uncer­tain­ties with the death penal­ty, includ­ing the dan­ger of con­vict­ing inno­cent peo­ple. He notes that Americans are grow­ing more skep­ti­cal of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and that they may be ​“begin­ning to under­stand that we just don’t need the death penal­ty, that it makes us no safer and demeans us as a people.”

(Washington Post, December 26, 2006; see full text of this col­umn below.). See Mental Illness and Innocence.

A Delusional System of Justice
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, December 26, 2006; A25

Since this is my last col­umn of 2006, tra­di­tion and cus­tom oblig­ate me to choose a per­son of the year. This prac­tice was start­ed by the late Henry Luce, who real­ized that choos­ing a man of the year would call as much atten­tion to his Time mag­a­zine as it would to the per­son him­self. I have some­what the same object in mind. My per­son of the year is Gregory Thompson. I choose him to call atten­tion to the mad­ness of the death penalty.

I apol­o­gize for the un-Christmasy nature of my top­ic, and I will under­stand if you choose to skip to anoth­er sub­ject. But if you can spare me a moment, I’d like to tell you about Thompson. He is a cold-blood­ed killer, plain and sim­ple. He is also out of his mind.

Thompson, 45, is delu­sion­al. He is also para­noid, schiz­o­phrenic and depressed. For these ail­ments, he receives dai­ly dos­es of drugs and, twice a month, anti-psy­chot­ic injec­tions. The state of Tennessee wants very much to put him to death for the hor­ren­dous 1985 mur­der of Brenda Blanton Lane, of which there is no doubt about his guilt. There is grave doubt, though, about the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty, not to men­tion the decen­cy, of exe­cut­ing an insane man. Thus the 12 pills Thompson takes every day. The idea, accord­ing to a recent account of his case in the Wall Street Journal, is to make him sane enough to be put to death.

Shortly before Justice Harry Blackmun retired from the Supreme Court in 1994, he reversed him­self on the death penal­ty. Blackmun had been a life­long sup­port­er, but final­ly had had enough. In words that were to become famous, he wrote, ​“From this day for­ward, I no longer shall tin­ker with the machin­ery of death.” It’s as if Blackmun had Thompson in mind, for in his case the tin­ker­ing occurs on a daily basis.

Blackmun was not the only Supreme Court jus­tice to change his mind about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Lewis Powell did some­thing sim­i­lar. He nev­er got to the point where he con­sid­ered it uncon­sti­tu­tion­al or immoral — he just con­clud­ed there was no way to get it right.

Now, from Powell’s point of view, mat­ters have even wors­ened. The death penal­ty has become so nec­es­sar­i­ly cum­ber­some to imple­ment, so full of essen­tial safe­guards, that it not only some­times can­not be done — note the recent sus­pen­sions of exe­cu­tions by lethal injec­tion — but it takes for­ev­er to do it. Thompson, you might have noticed, has been await­ing exe­cu­tion for near­ly 22 years — arguably cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment in itself.

If I were not forced to choose a per­son as my per­son of the year, I might choose a con­cept: cer­tain­ty. It is the one con­cept we can­not afford. Certainty is where we all get into trou­ble. We were so cer­tain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruc­tion that it was rea­son enough to go to war. And once we went to war, we were cer­tain that we would be wel­comed in Baghdad by ador­ing throngs of Iraqis. And all that cer­tain­ty was itself pre­ced­ed by the fer­vid cer­tain­ty of a pres­i­dent that he had been cho­sen for this war, this moment, this task. This was the worst cer­tain­ty of them all.

As we keep learn­ing, the dev­il is not in the details, it’s in our cer­tain­ty. This almost always is true of death-penal­ty cas­es. They are built on cer­tain­ty — wit­ness­es who were cer­tain, tech­ni­cians who were cer­tain, cops who were cer­tain, pros­e­cu­tors who were cer­tain and jurors who were cer­tain beyond a rea­son­able doubt. Yet rou­tine­ly we read about con­vic­tions being over­turned by DNA evi­dence. All those wit­ness­es, tech­ni­cians, cops, pros­e­cu­tors and jurors were wrong — cer­tain, but wrong. That, in effect, is the only cer­tain­ty. Occasionally, we will be wrong.

This year saw the fewest exe­cu­tions in a decade and grow­ing pub­lic sup­port for the alter­na­tive sen­tence of life with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole. The cyn­ic in me sus­pects that this is a result of his­tor­i­cal­ly low crime rates, not a sud­den appre­ci­a­tion of how dif­fi­cult it is to kill peo­ple prop­er­ly, legal­ly and, of course, justly.

Maybe, though, Americans are begin­ning to under­stand that we just don’t need the death penal­ty, that it makes us no safer and demeans us as a peo­ple. The case of Gregory Thompson is a case in point. He was prob­a­bly insane when he mur­dered Brenda Blanton Lane but will be deemed sane if and when he’s exe­cut­ed. He’s my per­son of the year — a fleet­ing­ly sane man in the maw of a thor­ough­ly insane system.

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