Death penalty and people with mental illnesses

People with serious mental illnesses are at a substantial disadvantage in defending themselves when they face criminal charges, and those difficulties have more serious consequences when the death penalty is sought. Stigma and fear are significant factors in jury verdicts in such cases, and the criminal justice system too often fails to do justice. As a result, people with mental illness are at heightened risk for losing their lives to unfair and capricious application of the death penalty.

Individuals with serious mental illness are threatened and coerced into false confessions, have difficulty understanding their rights, and have less access, because of their mental illness, to safeguards designed to protect fundamental rights, including the right to effective assistance of legal counsel.¹ Thus, it is not surprising that 43% of the inmates executed between 2000 and 2015 had received a mental illness diagnosis at some point in their lives.²

Persons with serious mental illnesses should not be eligible for a sentence of death.³ We should not impose this most serious and irreversible punishment on persons who, due to serious mental illness, are likely to:

• have lacked the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness and seriousness of their conduct irrespective of whether they meet the jurisdiction’s insanity defense.
• have lacked the ability to collaborate with an attorney to mount all available defenses to the charge or to the sentence.
• lack an appreciation of the punishment that they face.

Given the realities of our criminal justice system, including the underfunding of criminal defense services, the discrimination against people with mental illness, and the failure to adequately consider the effects of mental illness, public policy should not allow the  sentencing of  persons with serious mental illnesses to death or to carry out this sentence.

• Mental Health America (MHA) supports a moratorium on the use of the death penalty on persons with serious mental illnesses until the criminal justice system. can ensure a more just process for determining guilt and for considering a defendant’s mental status in sentencing.⁴
• The United States Supreme Court has prohibited a sentence of death for someone who had intellectual disabilities at the time of the offense.⁵  Similarly, the Court has declared imposing a sentence of death on juveniles unconstitutional.⁶ However, the Court has allowed persons who had a serious mental illnesses at the time of the offense to be sentenced to death, while barring the actual execution of persons who have a serious mental illness at the time when the execution is to be carried out.⁷ Sentencing juveniles and people with intellectual disabilities to death neither deters crime nor is an appropriate exercise of retribution.  That is why the United States Supreme Court has banned these practices.⁸ Sentencing persons with serious mental illnesses to death should be prohibited for the same reasons.
• The insanity defense can prevent people with serious mental illnesses from being executed. Unfortunately, the United States Supreme Court has held that the Due Process Clause does not require states to provide an insanity defense.⁹  Indeed, five states have abolished the insanity defense and many more have enacted substantive and procedural limitations on its use.  MHA believes that fundamental fairness requires the existence of an effective insanity defense.¹⁰
• Veterans make up 10% of death row prisoners and they are more likely to have trauma and mental health conditions.¹¹ African Americans are much more likely to be sentence to death than are White Americans charged with similar crimes.¹² Additionally, persons who murder White people are more likely to be sentenced to death than are persons who murder African Americans.  Although we do not have data on mental illness, race and the death penalty, it is likely that these factors intersect, constituting further support for removing the death penalty for people with serious mental illness.

Mental Health America urges affiliates and other advocates to:

• Work to enact laws and practices prohibiting a sentence of death for anyone with a serious mental illness at the time of the crime and the execution of someone with a serious mental illness who has been sentenced to death.
• Work to ensure that adequate resources are available in the criminal justice system to ensure that we identify defendants with a mental illness and provide them with those advocacy tools needed to obtain a fair trial and an appropriate sentence.
• Work to restore and enhance the use of the insanity defense in all jurisdictions.¹³
• Create a moratorium on the use of the death penalty for people with serious mental illness until states implement standards and procedures that ensure that no one with a serious mental illness is sentenced to death or executed.