Pardoned by ‘Hell Law’ but Doomed Anyway

Kelsey Patterson, a 50-year-old convicted murderer, is in the Polunsky Unit of the Texas prison system, where his behavior is regulated by implants in his brain and elsewhere in his body. Or so he believes. Patterson is psychotic. And on Tuesday, the state of Texas plans to execute him, assuming his appeals are turned down.

Regardless of how the courts rule, the larger issue, which remains unaddressed, is whether people with severe mental illnesses should be subject to the death sentence at all.

No one disputes that in September 1992, Patterson murdered Louis Oates and Dorothy Harris in Palestine, Texas, for no apparent reason. After he shot them he walked to the home of a friend, told him what he’d done, laid down his weapon, removed all of his clothes except his socks and strutted back and forth across the street, shouting incomprehensibly until the police arrived.

Patterson has a long history of serious mental illness. In fact, he’d been involved in two previous shootings but was never tried because the state concluded he was legally insane. After each of those incidents Patterson was confined to a state mental hospital, where he was given powerful antipsychotic drugs until his mental “competency” was restored. Each time, he was released without supervision and stopped taking his medications. In October 1991, he went to a pawn shop and bought the .38-caliber revolver he would use to murder Oates and Harris.

A jury found Patterson competent to stand trial after hearing from the state’s psychiatric expert, Dr. James Grigson, widely known as “Dr. Death” because of the scores of defendants -- including at least one innocent man -- he has helped land on death row.

And although Patterson’s trial was repeatedly interrupted by the defendant’s nonsensical outbursts, which led to his being evicted from the courtroom for nearly half of the proceeding, the jury found the evidence of mental illness insufficiently mitigating to spare him from execution.

Today, the only thing standing between Patterson and a lethal injection is whether a judge will revisit the issue of his mental competence. By law, the state may not execute someone who doesn’t understand that his execution is imminent and the reason for the execution.

Under such standards as presently interpreted, very few inmates can escape a death sentence. In 2000, a Florida judge found an inmate competent to be executed despite “clear and convincing evidence” that the defendant believed he was being executed because he was Jesus Christ. In January, Arkansas executed Charles Singleton, a paranoid schizophrenic who was delusional and was rendered legally “competent” only when the state forced him to take an antipsychotic drug.

Patterson’s lawyer, Gary Hart, says his client is legally insane in part because he believes that a court system controlled by Satan has granted him a permanent stay and a full pardon. In short, he doesn’t understand that his end is near.

Under normal circumstances, mental health professionals would evaluate Patterson’s competence to be executed. But Patterson has refused for years to talk to psychiatrists. Indeed, he has refused to talk to Hart for more than seven years because, he says, his attorney doesn’t understand “hell law.”

Hart insists that the U.S. Constitution does not allow the execution of someone whose “very mental illness obstructs the legal process and prevents anyone from evaluating him.” But so far, the courts have sided with Texas’ argument that Patterson has not produced enough evidence of incompetence to allow a team of experts to reexamine him or his mental health records.

Some Texas prosecutors acknowledge that their system fails to adequately address crimes committed by people with horrible mental illnesses. A state Senate committee recently launched an investigation into possible changes in the Texas insanity defense. But that won’t help Patterson.

There’s no question that the Texas death penalty is in need of a major overhaul and that there should be a moratorium on executions until serious reforms are put in place. Since that’s not going to happen, Gov. Rick Perry should at least have the decency to educate himself about Patterson’s case and read the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2-year-old decision banning executions of people with mental retardation.

That case, Atkins vs. Virginia, concluded that the mentally retarded have “diminished capacities to understand and process information, to communicate, to abstract from mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, to control impulses, and to understand the reactions of others.”

As a result, the court found retarded individuals less morally culpable and said their executions would contribute neither to retribution nor deterrence among others, the intended goals of capital punishment.

The same conclusions could easily apply to many juvenile offenders and people with major mental illnesses like Kelsey Patterson. These are not the people any state should be putting to death.