I wrote this journal entry late in my third year of law school, as I was taking a course on capital punishment that caused me to grapple daily with these issues. A few of you have already seen it, but I suddenly feel moved to discuss it again. I just reread it and felt as profoundly disturbed by the story the day that I first heard it.
A couple of weeks ago, I took the T into Boston to listen to a former death row inmate speak at Suffolk University Law School. This former inmate was particularly interesting because he was not an innocent man exonerated by DNA evidence. He was guilty of murder, but became so completely rehabilitated in prison and so sincerely tried to make amends with his victim's family that it was the victim's family who pleaded with the Georgia PTB first for a commutation of his death sentence, and subsequently for his full release. Fifteen years later, he still travels the country speaking to students, activists, and laypeople about the criminal justice system and life on death row.
In any case, it is not his story that troubles me; I am perfectly fine with his post-rehabilitation release from prison (although I won't go so far as to say that the alternative outcome would have been morally wrong.)
(Note: use of the term "mentally retarded" is not intended to be me taking a stance in the PC/anti-PC war over that term. "Mentally retarded" is the term used in the legal academic literature and by the courts, so I am using it for that reason.)
Alongside him on Georgia's death row was a mentally retarded inmate, also undeniably guilty of murder. (I will call him MRI, because his name did not stick with me.) MRI had always struggled in school. He was, in his own words, "the slow kid" whom the teachers and students ridiculed. He had never even learned how to read, and did not complete middle school. On death row, he yearned desperately to make up for his past academic failures. Enter the speaker (whose name I have also forgotten, so I will call him S.) S worked with MRI for 2-3 years, painstakingly teaching him how to read, write, do basic arithmetic, and otherwise develop basic reasoning skills. S gave MRI a sense of confidence about his academic abilities for the first time in his life.
Now, at the same time, MRI's pro bono attorney had been in the courts and in front of the Georgia PTB arguing that MRI should not be executed by virtue of his mental retardation, which had been documented prior to the age of eighteen. (This was before the SCOTUS ruling that it was unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded.) Nonetheless, the attorney managed to sway the PTB somewhat, and the state of Georgia agreed that it would not execute MRI, if he took and failed an IQ test. (The mental retardation threshold is at IQ=70. If his IQ was at or below a 70, the state would then not execute him.)
Now, MRI was informed that he would be taking what was described to him as an "intelligence test". And for the first time in his life, he was not dreading it. With all the excitement of a newly literate person, he announced to S that his attorney had told him great news. The state was going to give him a chance to prove his intelligence! (Somehow, I doubt his attorney, who seems to have been quite competent, put it to him quite like that.) Now, S and the other death row inmates were able to figure out what was going on, and they urged MRI that this was the one test in his life that he needed to fail, no matter what. They tried to explain to him that failure meant life; success meant death.
But MRI would have none of it. He told his fellow inmates, "You don't understand what it's like to have failed at everything you tried in school. You don't understand what it's like to always be the stupid kid, always be the hopeless case. Now, I finally know enough to have a chance at passing this intelligence test, and I'm going to give it my very best shot." No matter how much the others tried to explain the consequences of passing this "intelligence test", MRI was simply not able to comprehend its ramifications.
MRI did, in fact, give the "intelligence test" his best shot.
He did pass it. With an IQ of 71. He was gleeful at his "success", if by only one point, still not understanding that his success had signed his death warrant.
...and the state of Georgia executed him.
I cannot in good conscience celebrate the state-sanctioned execution of a man so mentally infirm that he could not comprehend the concept, repeatedly explained to him, that he had to fail an IQ test to be moved off death row. Equally troubling to me is a more mentally competent person would understand enough to lie on such a test and fake their way off death row, if given the opportunity.
But what truly makes me wonder is ... what if someone had gotten through earlier to this man, who felt so much pure, childlike joy at being given the ability to READ for the first time in his life? What if he had internalized that he was a human being with worth and potential, not an "incompetent idiot" who only merited derision? Would he have been a contributing member of society? Would he have been gainfully employed? Would he have friends and family who cared about him? For the state of Georgia to strap him to a wooden chair and send thousands of volts of electricity through his body was for them to pronounce their judgment: they could find nothing inside that shell, that body of his, worth saving. I wonder if they would have reached a different conclusion if just one person...one teacher or mentor or friend or parent had cared enough to channel that joy of learning before he could make it to death row. When there was still something more to say other than those ominous words, "May God have mercy on your soul."
I know that we discussed some of the constitutional issues involved last summer, but that thread has since moved in a different direction, and the Mormon thread is threatening rapidly to become a death penalty thread.
