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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