With Overwhelming Bipartisan Support, Kentucky House Passes Bill to Ban Death Penalty for Defendants with Serious Mental Illness

In an over­whelm­ing bipar­ti­san vote, the Kentucky House of Representatives has approved a bill that would pro­hib­it the death penal­ty for peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness. On March 1, 2021, the House vot­ed by a mar­gin of 75 – 16 to pass HB 148. The bill received the sup­port of 56 Republicans and 19 Democrats in Kentucky’s Republican-dominated legislature.

House Majority Whip Rep. Chad McCoy (R‑Bardstown, pic­tured), who spon­sored the bill, said, ​“This is not an insan­i­ty defense, not tak­ing away that. They will go to jail for life with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole. We’re just remov­ing the death penal­ty for this small segment.” 

Under the pro­vi­sion, defen­dants would be inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty if they had a doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry of schiz­o­phre­nia, schizoaf­fec­tive dis­or­der, bipo­lar dis­or­der, major depres­sive dis­or­der or delu­sion­al dis­or­der at the time of the offense. Rep. McCoy called the ill­ness­es includ­ed in the bill ​“very serious.”

A sim­i­lar mea­sure passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2020 but did not receive a vote in the full Senate. At that time, Sen. Julie Raque Adams (R – Louisville), who co-spon­sored the leg­is­la­tion, said ​“We don’t use the death penal­ty on peo­ple who have a low men­tal capac­i­ty. So why would we want to kill some­body, or inflict the death penal­ty, on some­body that real­ly has no under­stand­ing and [a] diag­no­sis of a severe men­tal ill­ness? Why would we want to sub­ject them to the death penal­ty, as well?”

Legislation to exempt peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness from exe­cu­tion has received grow­ing sup­port across the coun­try. On January 9, 2021, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law the nation’s first statute pro­hibit­ing the exe­cu­tion of indi­vid­u­als with severe men­tal ill­ness. Similar mea­sures had passed the Virginia state sen­ate in January 2019 and January 2020.

In 2016, the American Bar Association released a white paper pro­vid­ing pol­i­cy analy­sis in sup­port of a death-penal­ty exemp­tion for peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness. Similar pro­pos­als have gained the sup­port of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Mental Health America (MHA), the Treatment Advocacy Center, and state-lev­el coali­tions of men­tal health advocates.

The Kentucky leg­is­la­ture has con­sid­ered bills for a severe men­tal ill­ness exemp­tion to the death penal­ty in each of the last three leg­isla­tive ses­sions. Bills were report­ed out of Senate com­mit­tees in 2018 and 2020 but did not receive a floor vote. In each year, the lead spon­sor of the leg­is­la­tion was a Republican. This is the first time the full House of Representatives has con­sid­ered the issue. 

Kentucky has not exe­cut­ed any­one since 2008 and has not imposed a death sen­tence since 2014. As of October 1, 2020, 28 peo­ple were on the commonwealth’s death row.