AUSTIN, Texas -- About one-fourth of people executed in the U.S. over an 8-year period had a history of being either diagnosed or treated for mental illness, calling attention to the need to better address which prisoners receive the death penalty, researchers said here.
The 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, including execution of inmates who are insane, noted Paulina Riess, MD, of the BronxCare Health System in New York City, and colleagues noted in their poster presentation at the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law annual meeting.
However, "statistics show that few inmates actually assert that they are not competent to be executed," and there is controversy regarding the standard that should be used to decide whether someone is competent, the authors noted.
To get at the issue, the investigators examined data from the and other websites on prisoners executed during the years 2010-2017. Specific variables examined included age, race, "instant offense" -- -- the offense meriting the death penalty -- method of execution, years spent on Death Row, inmate psychiatric history and diagnoses, and inmate history of treatment with psychotropic medication.
A total of 273 people were executed during the study period, 268 of which were male. A total of 147 executed inmates were white, 90 were black, 35 were Latino, and one was Native American. The majority of the executed inmates (205) had an instant offense of homicide only, followed by homicide plus rape, homicide plus robbery, homicide plus rape plus kidnapping, and mass murder or serial killing. The vast majority of the inmates (270) were executed by lethal injection; two were executed with electrocution and one via a firing squad.
Most of the prisoners (117) had been on Death Row for 11-20 years, with the next biggest group (64) having spent 21-30 years on Death Row, and 15 prisoners having spent 31-40 years. Only five prisoners had been on Death Row for ≤5 years.
In terms of a psychiatric record, the researchers found that 26% of those executed had a history of mental illness and/or were treated with psychotropic medication. However, that information wasn't available on the Death Penalty Information Center site and was difficult to find, Riess told 51˶.
"One of the limitations of the study is that the federal government is not very forthcoming with this information, so we had to rely on other sources and media coverage and Internet searches and such," she said. "The next step is really going to be to see if anybody incompetent was executed. If you think [about it], should we be executing people with mental illness, period? Because if it takes 7 to 8 hours in a botched execution to get a needle in somebody, and they have a history of schizophrenia, for example, or any severe mental illness, how do we know they don't decompensate?"
Riess said her group found their results disturbing, and that finding out more about the inmates' mental health history "is going to be a challenge, but that is the goal -- maybe collaborate with more people and see if somebody has this information."
Primary Source
American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
Riess P, et al "Capital Punishment and Mental Illness: Cruel and Unusual Punishment" AAPL 2018; Poster Session 2.