Fort Wayne News-Sentinel: Should Indiana still cling to the death penalty?

[Stefanie Faucher]

http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20141202/EDITORIAL/141209963/1015

EDITORIAL
Fort Wayne News-Sentinel (Indiana)
Should Indiana still cling to the death penalty?
Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - 12:01 am

The more people removed from the pool, the more problematic it is.

Will it be worth pursuing the death penalty in Indiana ever again? It’s a fair question, asked in exasperation by Johnson County Prosecutor Brad Cooper, who complains that his county just wasted “millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours to win the death-penalty conviction of rapist-murderer Michael Dean Overstreet.

St. Joseph County Judge Jane Woodward Miller, following the guidelines of a 1986 Supreme Court decision that people with severe mental illnesses cannot be executed if they cannot understand why the state is putting them to death, has ruled that he is not competent enough to be put to death. That means he will remain on death row, but he cannot be executed unless his mental condition improves.

Overstreet is a paranoid schizophrenic who believes, a forensic psychiatrist has testified, that he’s either already dead or in a coma and that the execution would allow him to wake up in his body and return to his family.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that children and the mentally retarded cannot be executed, on the grounds that they will not understand what is happening to them. So perhaps add the severely mentally ill to that list. Indiana University law professor Jody Madeira says the judge’s ruling sets a high threshold that could be more difficult for attorneys to prove, especially in cases of death row inmates who suffer from shorter-term or less severe illnesses than Overstreet’s paranoid schizophrenia.

Indiana already executes very few people. Just plain old first degree murder isn’t enough --capital punishment is reserved for the worst of the worst. And very few of them get more than life with paroled -- death penalty cases and the ensuing years of the appeal process simply cost more than many counties can afford.

It has been five years since anyone was executed in Indiana. The more people we remove from the death penalty pool, the greater the chance the years between executions will grow even more. Our capital punishment system will be without rhyme or reason, and that will be both arbitrary and capricious, clearly and directly forbidden by the Constitution.

Capital punishment can serve legitimate functions in a civilized society, if it is thoughtfully and carefully pursued. That is not being done in Indiana.



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Stefanie Faucher
Communications Director
8th Amendment Project
sfau...@8thamendment.org
Mobile 510.393.4549
8thamendment.org