NCJ Number
139041
Journal
Behavioral Sciences and the Law Volume: 10 Issue: 3 Dated: (Summer 1992), 339-351
Date Published
1992
Length
13 pages
Annotation
This article describes the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1986 ruling in Ford v. Wainwright, which held that incompetence to be executed for mentally disordered defendants is a constitutional right and that the determination of who is competent to be executed could not be left up the sole discretion of the executive branch.
Abstract
The Court remanded Ford's case for a full evidentiary hearing in Federal district court in Florida. Meanwhile, the State legislature adopted emergency rules for dealing with mentally incompetent death row inmates. At the evidentiary hearing, the State maintained that Ford was malingering, and, even if psychotic, was not incompetent because he understood the consequences of his actions. The defense presented psychological and psychiatric testimony to the effect that Ford was schizophrenic. The judge's ruling that Ford was indeed competent to be executed was appealed on two issues: whether the finding was erroneous and whether a condemned person who suffered from schizophrenia and was intermittently rendered incompetent was competent to be executed. The appeal was never decided because Alvin Ford died in prison of natural causes. Left unresolved by his death are issues of how to define incompetency, how to appeal negative rulings, and how to judge cases in which the defendant vacillates between incompetency and competency. 23 references