A recent article in the Wayne Law Review by Prof. Phillys L. Crocker of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law examines the Supreme Court’s struggle with the issue of death row inmates waiving their appeals. Crocker uses Rees v. Peyton, a capital case that remained on the Court’s docket from 1965-1995, to explore the issue. In that case, Virginia death row inmate Melvin Rees sought to withdraw his petition for a writ of certiorari so that he could be executed. In 1967, the Supreme Court stayed the proceeding after Rees was found incompetent to waive his appeal, but it did not dismiss the case until after he died of natural causes. In her article, Not to Decide is to Decide: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Thirty-Year Struggle with One Case About Competency to Waive Death Penalty Appeals, Crocker concludes:

The Court documents in Rees are historically significant because they reveal, for the first time, how the Court resolved the difficult issues it faced regarding how to determine whether Rees was competent to decide whether to abandon or continue litigating his case, and whether to proceed once the federal district court found Rees incompetent…. For litigators and courts seeking guidance in how to proceed in death penalty cases when the death row inmate may be incompetent, the Rees documents establish a strong historical model for thoroughly examining an inmate’s mental capacity and staying court proceedings when the inmate is deemed incompetent.”

(49 Wayne Law Review 885 (2004)). See Supreme Court, Mental Illness, and Resources

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