Entries tagged with “Mental Incompetence”
Issues
Oct 03, 2022
California Governor Signs into Law Bill Expanding Racial Justice Act to Prisoners Already on Death Row
California Governor Gavin Newsom (pictured) has signed into law a bill that provides death-row prisoners relief from convictions or death sentences obtained “on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.” The California Racial Justice Act for All applies the provisions of the state’s 2020 Racial Justice Act to people previously convicted of felonies. The original law applied only to criminal cases in which the trial court judgment was issued on or after January 1, 2021. The expanded…
Issues
Upcoming Executions
,Sep 22, 2022
Lawyers for Mentally Ill Oklahoma Death-Row Prisoner Seek Clemency, Competency Trial
Lawyers for Oklahoma death-row prisoner Benjamin Cole have filed a petition with the Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Parole asking the Board to recommend to Governor Kevin Stitt that Cole’s sentence be commuted to life without parole. The petition, submitted to the board on September 16, 2022, states that “Benjamin Cole today is a frail, 57-year-old man with a damaged and deteriorating brain, suffering from progressive and severe mental illness who poses no threat to anyone in any way.” Cole…
Issues
Sep 06, 2022
California Passes Legislation to Make Racial Justice Act Retroactive, Remove Permanently Mentally Incompetent Prisoners from Death Row
The California legislature has taken a major stride towards reforming the state’s death-penalty practices, passing two bills that would remove from death row individuals whose capital convictions were the product of racial discrimination and those whose deteriorated mental condition has left them permanently mentally incompetent. On August 31, 2022, the California Assembly concurred in Senate Amendments and sent to the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom The Racial Justice Act for All, which makes…
Issues
Aug 27, 2021
California Supreme Court Overturns Conviction of Defendant who Represented Himself After Expert Deemed Him Incompetent to Stand Trial
The California Supreme Court has reversed the conviction of a death-row prisoner who was permitted to waive counsel and represent himself despite a mental health expert’s finding that he was too mentally ill even to stand trial. On August 23, 2021, the appeals court granted a new trial to Edward M. Wycoff in the 2006 murders of his sister and brother-in-law. In a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Martin Jenkins (pictured), the court held that Wycoff’s trial was unconstitutionally tainted…
Issues
Federal Death Penalty
,Aug 26, 2021
Federal Appeals Court Upholds Convictions and Death Sentences for Dylann Roof
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has affirmed Dylann Roof’s federal-court convictions and death sentences for the racially motivated murders of nine parishioners in an historic Charleston, South Carolina African-American church in 2017. In a 149-page decision issued on August 25, 2021 by a special panel of judges assembled from outside the circuit, the federal appeals court unanimously rejected nineteen issues raised by Roof’s appellate lawyers. Those issues include matters…
Issues
Time on Death Row
,Jun 10, 2021
Raymond Riles, the Nation’s Longest Serving Death-Row Prisoner, is Resentenced to Life
Raymond Riles (pictured), the nation’s longest serving death-row prisoner, has been resentenced to life. On June 9, 2021, Harris County, Texas District Judge Ana Martinez imposed the life sentence via a Zoom teleconference after county prosecutors determined that Riles was incompetent to participate in a capital resentencing trial and, if again sentenced to death, would never be mentally competent to be executed. The 71-year-old Riles was originally sentenced to death on December 11, 1975…
Issues
Federal Death Penalty
,May 27, 2021
Citing Mental Incompetency From Racist Delusions, Appeal Lawyers Argue Trial Court Should Not Have Permitted Dylann Roof to Represent Himself
Lawyers for federal death row prisoner Dylann Roof argued to a federal appeals court that the avowed white supremacist’s convictions and death sentences in his trial for the 2015 murders of nine Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina should be overturned because the judge presiding over his case unconstitutionally permitted Roof to represent himself while mentally incompetent. In oral argument on May 25, 2021 before a specially constituted…
Issues
Time on Death Row
,Apr 19, 2021
Texas Appeals Court Overturns Death Sentence of Nation’s Longest Serving Death-Row Prisoner
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has overturned the death sentence of the nation’s longest-serving death-row prisoner, 45 years after he was first sent to death row. In an unpublished opinion issued on April 14, 2021, the TCCA held that Raymond Riles (pictured), originally sentenced to death by a Harris County jury on December 11, 1975, is entitled to a new sentencing hearing. The court ruled that Riles had been unconstitutionally sentenced to death in his 1978 retrial when the trial…
Issues
Time on Death Row
,Feb 08, 2021
Harris County DA Seeks to Vacate Sentence for Nation’s Longest-Serving Death-Row Prisoner
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-row prisoner. Riles, who has a significant history of mental illness that prosecutors and defense lawyers alike have long agreed make him incompetent to be executed, was convicted and sentenced to death 45 years ago, on February 4, 1976. When Charles Foster, who was sentenced to death in Florida in…
Issues
Nov 10, 2020
Lawyers Argue 79-Year-Old Ohio Death-Row Prisoner with Dementia is Incompetent to Be Executed
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 punishment. Legal papers filed in the Lucas County Court of Common Pleas in October 2020 assert that Frazier, now 79 years old, suffered a series of mini-strokes in 2017 that have caused serious physical, psychological, and cognitive impairments that make him incompetent to be executed.
Issues
Aug 24, 2020
Capital Case Roundup — Death Penalty Court Decisions the Week of August 17, 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 in Orange County and upholding his conviction and death sentence in a Los Angeles County case. In granting a new trial in the 1983 Orange County murder of a 19-year-old woman, a 2 – 1 panel of the circuit court held that the trial court violated Kipp’s due…
Issues
Upcoming Executions
,Jul 01, 2020
Capital Case Roundup — Death Penalty Court Decisions the Week of June 29, 2020
NEWS (7/2/20) — Florida: The Florida Supreme Court denied relief to death-row prisoner Leroy Pooler, applying two recent decisions that retroactively rescinded case precedent that could have overturned his death sentence. The court ruled that it would not apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Hall v. Florida to Pooler’s intellectual disability claim, leaving in place a prior state court decision that had used an unconstitutionally narrow standard to reject his claim. The court also ruled…
Issues
Upcoming Executions
,May 01, 2020
Missouri Supreme Court Denies Stay of May 19 Execution for Brain-Damaged Man Tried Five Times for the Same Murder
In a case long marred by prosecutorial misconduct, the Missouri Supreme Court has denied a stay of execution for Walter Barton (pictured), rejecting his claims of innocence and incompetence to be executed. The court’s ruling on April 27, 2020 made no mention of Barton’s additional request to put off his execution because of public health dangers relating to the coronavirus pandemic. If Barton’s execution is carried out as scheduled on May 19, it would be the first in the nation since the…