1,021 given brain damaging ECT

by ipsiphi Sat Jan 10, 2004 17:41

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.

Before he died, the Prison authorities administered anti-psychotic drugs so that _he would fully appreciate his execution_.

Both Amnesty international and the EU petitioned the State and Prison authorities to stop this barbarism, which clearly demonstrates what [former Supreme Court] Justice [Thurgood] Marshall called ‘the barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance’”

[[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.]]

C/P from various sources:-

Amnesty International condemned the execution: “While more than half the world has abolished the death penalty in law or in practice, the United States has allowed Charles Singleton to be executed—a man who suffers from irrefutable mental illness. Global standards of decency prohibit the execution of ‘persons who have become insane.’ Singleton was said to be ‘seriously deranged without treatment’ and ‘arguably incompetent with treatment.’... The execution of the mentally ill is another example of the arbitrary and unfair manner in which the death penalty system is administered.”


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/exec-j08.shtml

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 Judge Dredd Sat Jan 10, 2004 19:29

This just further illustrates the obscenity of policy-making in the US. First they cause problems by cutting back on care for the most vulnerable, then the inevitable happens - it leads to further mayhem in society, then they decide their only option is to dump on the people they let down.
Anyway, bearing in mind that many in the US government themselves seem to be insane, would it help if THEY were the (forcible) recipients of these anti-psychotic drugs? Perhaps it might help them to rethink their policy on the death penalty, and on waging war.