The US supreme court has just a few hours to decide whether to spare the life of a Missouri death row inmate who is set to be executed at 7pm local time tonight even though he is mentally impaired from a work accident that removed a large portion of his brain.
Lawyers acting for Cecil Clayton, 74, have called on the nation’s highest court to intervene and stay the execution. In a petition to the nine justices, they argue that it would be unconstitutional to execute the prisoner because under a slew of rulings in recent years the supreme court has banned judicial killings of insane and intellectually disabled people.
Clayton lost about a fifth of his frontal lobe in 1972 when a splinter from a log he was working on in a sawmill in Purdy, Missouri, dislodged and slammed into his skull. The damage has had a long-term impact on his character and behavior, with a succession of medical experts chronicling problems ranging from uncontrolled rage to hallucinations and depression.
The frontal lobe has an important function in controlling impulse and emotion.
In 1996, Clayton murdered a police officer, Christopher Castetter, who was called to a house where Clayton had broken in. There has been no dispute about his guilt, though there has been intense debate about whether he should be protected from the gurney.
In 2002 the US supreme court ruled in Atkins v Virginia that it was unconstitutional to put to death an intellectually disabled person (previously known as mental retardation) under the eighth amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Last year that protection was strengthened in Hall v Florida which obligated states to consider several indicators of intellectual disability, not just an IQ cut-off score.
There are also strong mental illness protections for death row inmates. Ford v Wainwright in 1986 established that an insane person cannot be executed, and that too was subsequently toughened up in 2007 in Panetti v Quaterman which ruled that a person cannot be put to death if he does not “know the fact of his impending execution and the reason for it”.
The petition that is currently before the nine justices argues that Clayton is dependent on their intervention as his constitutional rights have not been honored by lower courts. The Missouri supreme court, the most senior panel in the state, has refused even to hold a hearing to consider whether or not Clayton is insane or intellectually disabled.
