Texas Can’t Forcibly Medicate Inmate So It Can Execute Him

Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the State’s Supreme Court for Criminal Cases) ruled that the state cannot forcibly medicate a death-row inmate to make him competent, so it can then execute him.  Full Story 

It has long been the law that the state cannot execute a person who is mentally incompetent to understand why he is being executed.  This defeats one of the principles of execution.  

Steven Staley is a mentally ill death row inmate who fatally shot a Fort Worth restaurant manager in the course of a robbery that came at the end of a four-state crime spree with two accomplices.  He was sentenced to death in 1991.  Staley has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.  The Texas Tribune reported that:

“Jail staffers have found Staley in his cell covered with his feces and urine. He has bruised himself by banging his head against walls, and he has lain catatonic for so long that he wore a bald spot on the back of his head. 

"He believes there is a big conspiracy orchestrated by the state and that everybody, everybody, is part of the conspiracy," his attorney, John Stickels, said in May 2012. "He believes that he was wrongfully convicted because of the conspiracy."

In February 2006, Staley's execution was stayed after the court found him mentally incompetent. In 2006, he told psychologist Mark Cunningham that the jury found him guilty because the judge was trying to steal his one-of-a-kind faded red 1958 Pontiac pickup, which he said had a $1.5 million street value, and because Oprah Winfrey paid off the jury.

After that stay, Tarrant County state district Judge Wayne Salvant ordered Staley to be forcibly medicated.”

Both the American Psychiatric Association and American Medical Association both consider it unethical for doctors forcibly medicate individuals for the sole purpose of executing them.  The Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the trial judge did not have the authority to order Staley to be medicated.  Without the medication, he is not competent for execution.

The court got this one right.  It is just wrong to forcibly medicate a prisoner solely in order to execute him.  It will be another issue, however, if Staley is given medication to treat his schizophrenia, from which he clearly suffers, and then he is then competent as a side effect of that treatment.  If he refuses treatment to avoid execution, only, the man will be living inside the hell of his imagination. He and his attorneys are in a bind on that.