Policy Issues
Mental Illness
There is no categorical ban on the execution of people with mental illness. Legislatures in numerous states have considered bills creating such an exclusion, but none has yet been enacted.
Policy Issues
There is no categorical ban on the execution of people with mental illness. Legislatures in numerous states have considered bills creating such an exclusion, but none has yet been enacted.
American Bar Association Death Penalty Due Process Review Project
Military Veterans and the Death Penalty (Features information on PTSD and other combat-related mental health problems)
The U.S. Supreme Court has said a defendant’s mental illness makes him or her less morally culpability and must be taken into consideration as an important reason to spare his or her life. However, as was initially the case with intellectual disability and young age, the Court has not barred the death penalty for those with serious mental illness. When the Court prohibited the death penalty for the intellectually disabled and for juveniles, it found that they were members of identifiable groups who have diminished responsibility for their actions and hence should not be considered the worst and most culpable defendants. Many mental health experts believe that people with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may have similar cognitive impairments that interfere with their decision-making. The American Psychiatric Association and the American Bar Association, among others, have called for a ban on the death penalty for those with severe mental illness.
Some defendants are so mentally ill as to lack all understanding of their crime and its consequences and may be considered mentally incompetent. Such individuals may be unfit to stand trial or be found not guilty by reason of insanity. If they are convicted and become incompetent while on death row, they cannot be executed, under earlier Supreme Court precedent. However, most people with mental illness — including many with severe mental illness — are not mentally incompetent.
Mental health issues have broad impact in death-penalty cases. One in ten prisoners executed in the United States are “volunteers” — defendants or prisoners who have waived key trial or appeal rights to facilitate their execution. Mental illness also affects defendants’ decisions to represent themselves, their ability to work with counsel, and jury’s perceptions of their motives and whether they pose a future danger to society if they are sentenced to life in prison.
There are at least three hurdles to excluding the severely mentally ill: 1. Unlike age and intellectual ability, it is difficult to define the class of mentally ill defendants who should be exempted and to determine whether their illness affected their judgment when they offended. 2. States have so far been reluctant to adopt such bans, though society continues to evolve in terms of its understanding of mental illness. 3. The membership of the Supreme Court has shifted since some of the earlier exemptions were decided. Nevertheless, the prior decisions could serve as important precedents, capable of being extended to the mentally ill.
DPIC has tracked the various state legislative efforts to address the mental illness issue. It frequently highlights instances in which mentally ill defendants receive unfair death-penalty trials, face execution, or have been granted clemency or other relief. It also gathers statements from relevant leaders in the mental health field regarding this issue.
Apr 02, 2020
Courts are failing badly in keeping junk psychological science out of the courtroom in criminal cases, permitting the admission of psychological tests that have never been reviewed for reliability and others that have been found unreliable, a rece…
Read MoreFeb 08, 2021
The Harris County District Attorney’s office has asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the death sentence imposed on Raymond Riles (pictured), the nation’s longest-serving death-ro…
Jan 18, 2021
An historically aberrant six-month federal execution spree came to a close after midnight on January 16, 2021 when an African-American man who was scheduled to die on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday was put to death…
Jan 13, 2021
After a series of rulings by the United States Supreme Court summarily vacated two stays of execution and denied attempts to reinstate two others, the federal government executed death row prisoner Lisa Montgomery…
Jan 11, 2021
Ohio has banned the death penalty for defendants who were severely mentally ill at the time of the offense. On January 9, 2021, Governor Mike DeWine (pictured) signed into law House Bill 136, which prohibits impos…
Dec 18, 2020
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the human rights body charged with overseeing Western Hemisphere nations’ compliance with human rights obligations, has called on the United States to halt the scheduled Janua…
Nov 12, 2020
A diverse coalition of more than 1,000 advocates, including current and former prosecutors, activists fighting sex trafficking and domestic violence, and mental health organizations, have joined forces to ask President Donald Trump to halt the upc…
Nov 10, 2020
Lawyers for James Frazier (pictured), Ohio’s oldest death-row prisoner, have filed a motion to prevent his execution, arguing that he has severe vascular dementia that has rendered him unable to understand his pun…
Nov 06, 2020
The Death Penalty Information Center is partnering with the Veteran Advocacy Project to present a six-part webinar series on Veterans and the Death Penalty. The webinars, which are co-sponsored by Advancing Real Change, Inc. and Witness to Innocen…
Oct 19, 2020
The federal government intends to continue its unprecedented execution spree into December, scheduling the executions of the first woman and the youngest offender put to death by federal authorities in nearly seven decades. In a Friday evening ann…
Aug 24, 2020
NEWS (8/19/20) — California: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit released habeas corpus appeal decisions in two capital cases involving California death-row prisoner Martin Kipp, overturning his conviction in a case prosecuted …