News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, IN): A good reason to rethink the death penalty

[Stefanie Faucher]

http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20141117/EDITORIAL/141119702/-1/LIVING

News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Indiana)

EDITORIAL

A good reason to rethink the death penalty

Monday, November 17, 2014 - 8:46 am

It's not a deterrent, and we don't execute the worst of the worst.

If someone has a mental illness that makes him unclear on the very concept of death, is that a valid reason not to execute him?

That’s the question raised in the case of Michael Dean Overstreet, convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 abduction, rape and killing of 18-year-old Franklin College student Kelly Eckhart. His attorneys are asking St. Joseph County Judge Jane Woodward Miller to rule Overstreet is not competent to be executed because he doesn’t understand that he would die.

“Given his specific delusion, Overstreet would go to the execution chamber believing that he would not die but rather would transition back to life with his family. He cannot prepare himself in any spiritual sense for death,” his attorneys wrote.

The state counters that several of Overstreet’s phone calls and emails include conversations in which he discussed topics related to his death and noted that he has prepared a will and made plans with relatives to visit him in prison before he is executed.

If Overstreet is capable of grasping death, he deserves no more consideration than any other death row inmate. If he isn’t, it raises an interesting philosophical dilemma. Does that add to the cruel and unusual nature of executing him because the state will inflict on him something he doesn’t understand? Or would it diminish it because it takes away the most agonizing part of execution, the long wait of dreading what’s coming?

As interesting as that dilemma is, another aspect to the case makes Overstreet’s execution even more troubling. If the judge rules against him, he could be the first inmate executed in Indiana since 2009.

With five years between executions, no one can claim that the death penalty is a deterrent in any meaningful sense. That means the only reason to execute someone is to express our sense of moral outrage, convey the idea that some crimes are so horrible only the death penalty will do.

You can’t be executed Indiana just for killing somebody. You also have to meet one or more of carefully spelled out aggravating circumstances. The state, then, intends to kill for only the worst of the worst of the worst crimes. Clearly, though, it does not always do that.

The state, once in a great while, puts somebody to death just because it can. Talk about arbitrary and capricious.



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