Mentally Ill Inmate Put to Death after Medical “Treatment” Prepares Execution
From the website for the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics.
By Kate Randall, 8 January 2004. View orginal.
[CCLE is opposed to government agents forcing a nondangerous person to take a psychoactive drug. In this case, the government forcibly injected Mr. Singleton with an "anti-psychotic" drug and then gave him a lethal injection to administer the death penalty. To learn more about the CCLE's thoughts on the Singleton case, please see the first article in 4:1 Jnl of Cognitive Liberties, (168 Kb PDF) written by CCLE legal counsel Richard Glen Boire.]
Death row inmate Charles Singleton, 44, died by lethal injection at the Cummins Unit Prison near Varner, Arkansas on Tuesday, January 6. Singleton was convicted of the 1979 stabbing death of Mary Lou York, and had spent 23 years on death row....
Singleton, who was also known as Victor Ra Hakim, had been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. A 1986 Supreme Court decision, Ford v. Wainwright, bars execution of the mentally insane—those who cannot understand the reality of, or reason for, their punishment. In Singleton’s case, authorities got around this prohibition by obtaining a court order to forcibly medicate him to render him temporarily mentally competent—in order to be put to death....
The United States is one of the few industrialized countries which continue to permit the barbaric practice of capital punishment. Not only does it allow the death penalty, but it allows the ultimate punishment to be meted out against foreign nationals, those convicted for crimes committed as juveniles and—as demonstrated by Charles Singleton’s case—the mentally ill.
Execution of the mentally ill is the most extreme manifestation of a system in which US jails and prisons are teeming with inmates with psychological problems. As psychiatric institutions in recent decades have shut down, throwing patients into the streets, more and more of these individuals have found themselves arrested, prosecuted by an increasingly punitive judicial system and incarcerated. Experts estimate that somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 persons with mental illnesses are confined in US prisons.
An estimated 5 percent of the general US population suffers from mental illness. However, a National Commission on Correctional Health Care report to Congress in March 2002 presented these shocking estimates of the prevalence of mental illness among prisoners on any given day:
* 2.3-3.9 percent of inmates suffer schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder;
* 13.1-18.6 percent have major depression;
* 2.1-4.3 percent are suffering bipolar disorder (manic episode);
* 8.4-13.4 percent have dysthymia (mild depression);
* 22.0-30.1 percent suffer from an anxiety disorder;
* 6.2-11.7 percent are victims of post-traumatic stress disorder.
These are indices of a virtual epidemic of mental illness, calling for a crisis intervention of medical and psychological professionals. They are also an expression of the tragic impact of a complex combination of social and economic factors—in no small way exacerbated by the stresses pervading American life.
However, the response on the part of police and judicial authorities to this crisis is to increasingly criminalize the mentally ill. Those who find their way to prison are often misdiagnosed and untreated. In a cruel twist, in Charles Singleton’s case, the authorities pushed for his “treatment” in order to send him to his death.
By Kate Randall, 8 January 2004. View orginal.
[CCLE is opposed to government agents forcing a nondangerous person to take a psychoactive drug. In this case, the government forcibly injected Mr. Singleton with an "anti-psychotic" drug and then gave him a lethal injection to administer the death penalty. To learn more about the CCLE's thoughts on the Singleton case, please see the first article in 4:1 Jnl of Cognitive Liberties, (168 Kb PDF) written by CCLE legal counsel Richard Glen Boire.]
Death row inmate Charles Singleton, 44, died by lethal injection at the Cummins Unit Prison near Varner, Arkansas on Tuesday, January 6. Singleton was convicted of the 1979 stabbing death of Mary Lou York, and had spent 23 years on death row....
Singleton, who was also known as Victor Ra Hakim, had been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. A 1986 Supreme Court decision, Ford v. Wainwright, bars execution of the mentally insane—those who cannot understand the reality of, or reason for, their punishment. In Singleton’s case, authorities got around this prohibition by obtaining a court order to forcibly medicate him to render him temporarily mentally competent—in order to be put to death....
The United States is one of the few industrialized countries which continue to permit the barbaric practice of capital punishment. Not only does it allow the death penalty, but it allows the ultimate punishment to be meted out against foreign nationals, those convicted for crimes committed as juveniles and—as demonstrated by Charles Singleton’s case—the mentally ill.
Execution of the mentally ill is the most extreme manifestation of a system in which US jails and prisons are teeming with inmates with psychological problems. As psychiatric institutions in recent decades have shut down, throwing patients into the streets, more and more of these individuals have found themselves arrested, prosecuted by an increasingly punitive judicial system and incarcerated. Experts estimate that somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 persons with mental illnesses are confined in US prisons.
An estimated 5 percent of the general US population suffers from mental illness. However, a National Commission on Correctional Health Care report to Congress in March 2002 presented these shocking estimates of the prevalence of mental illness among prisoners on any given day:
* 2.3-3.9 percent of inmates suffer schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder;
* 13.1-18.6 percent have major depression;
* 2.1-4.3 percent are suffering bipolar disorder (manic episode);
* 8.4-13.4 percent have dysthymia (mild depression);
* 22.0-30.1 percent suffer from an anxiety disorder;
* 6.2-11.7 percent are victims of post-traumatic stress disorder.
These are indices of a virtual epidemic of mental illness, calling for a crisis intervention of medical and psychological professionals. They are also an expression of the tragic impact of a complex combination of social and economic factors—in no small way exacerbated by the stresses pervading American life.
However, the response on the part of police and judicial authorities to this crisis is to increasingly criminalize the mentally ill. Those who find their way to prison are often misdiagnosed and untreated. In a cruel twist, in Charles Singleton’s case, the authorities pushed for his “treatment” in order to send him to his death.
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