Three quar­ters of American exe­cu­tions in 2015 involved cas­es of ​“crip­pling dis­abil­i­ties and uncer­tain guilt,” accord­ing to a report by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard University. Saying that the 2015 exe­cu­tions revealed ​“a bro­ken cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem,” the report found that, “[o]f the 28 peo­ple exe­cut­ed [in 2015], 75% were men­tal­ly impaired or dis­abled, expe­ri­enced extreme child­hood trau­ma or abuse, or were of ques­tion­able guilt.” It said sev­en peo­ple who were exe­cut­ed suf­fered from seri­ous intel­lec­tu­al impair­ment or brain injury, includ­ing Warren Hill, who even the state’s doc­tors agreed had intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, and Cecil Clayton, who lost 20% of his pre­frontal cor­tex as a result of a sawmill acci­dent. An addi­tion­al sev­en suf­fered from seri­ous men­tal ill­ness­es. One, Andrew Brannan, was a dec­o­rat­ed war vet­er­an whom the Veterans Administration had clas­si­fied as 100% dis­abled as a result of com­bat-relat­ed Posttraumatic Stress Disorder from his ser­vice in Vietnam. The report iden­ti­fied five more cas­es in which the exe­cut­ed pris­on­ers had expe­ri­enced extreme child­hood trau­ma and abuse, and anoth­er two — Lester Bower and Brian Keith Terrell — in which it said the exe­cut­ed men ​“were poten­tial­ly inno­cent.” The report also high­light­ed devel­op­ments described in DPIC’s Year End Report, includ­ing the increas­ing iso­la­tion of death penal­ty use to a small num­ber of juris­dic­tions. ​“Only a hand­ful of out­lier coun­ties still impose the death penal­ty,” the report said, and an exam­i­na­tion of prac­tices in those coun­ties often ​“reveals themes of overzeal­ous pros­e­cu­tors who often bend the rules, poor­ly per­form­ing defense lawyers, and a lega­cy of racial bias.” As a result, ​“these out­lier coun­ties tend to [also have] an unac­cept­able his­to­ry of con­vict­ing the inno­cent and indi­vid­u­als with crip­pling men­tal impair­ments.” (Click image to enlarge.)

(“Death Penalty 2015 Year End Report,” Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, December 16, 2015.) See Mental Illness, Intellectual Disability, and Innocence.

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