[News] US state executes mentally sick African American

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US state executes mentally sick man

Wednesday 07 January 2004 4:50 AM GMT


Arkansas has executed a man with a severe mental illness who was forcibly 
medicated with anti-psychotic drugs, which made him lucid enough under 
court guidelines to be put to death.

Charles Singleton, 44, a diagnosed schizophrenic was given a lethal 
injection on Tuesday in the state's death chamber in Varner, about 115km 
southeast of Little Rock, for stabbing white grocery store clerk Mary Lou 
York to death in 1979.

Another prisoner Karl Roberts, 35, was put to death after Singleton for 
raping and killing his 12-year-old niece.

Lawyers for Roberts filed a last-minute appeal requesting a temporary stay 
of execution, which was granted by a federal court.

Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said he would not issue a stay for 
Singleton, who had run out of appeals.

Several groups such as the European Union and Amnesty International 
petitioned the governor to commute the death sentence, saying it was 
morally reprehensible to execute a person with a severe mental illness.

Psychotic episodes

While in prison, Singleton's mental condition worsened and he was forcibly 
given powerful drugs to curtail his psychotic episodes, under a 1990 US 
Supreme Court decision that allows states to forcibly medicate a prisoner 
if that person is a danger to himself or others, and the treatment is in 
that person's medical interest.

According to Amnesty International, Singleton was likely suffering from 
schizophrenia.

"By the late 1980s he had begun to suffer delusions, including that his 
cell was possessed by demons, that a prison doctor had implanted a device 
in his ear, and that his thoughts were being stolen when he read the 
Bible," said the human rights watchdog.

Lawyers for Singleton appealed to have the medication stopped, saying that 
it was not in their client's medical interest to be declared mentally 
competent enough to be executed.

Last year, the Eighth Circuit federal court ruled that Arkansas could 
forcibly medicate Singleton. In the decision, the court said that 
"eligibility for execution is the only unwanted consequence of the 
medication."

The US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the
lower court's decision.

The Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot execute mentally retarded 
prisoners or those whose mental illness makes it impossible for them to 
understand that they are going to be put to death.

The race factor


Singleton was tried in front of an all-white jury for the murder of a white 
woman. According to Amnesty International, at least one in five of the 300 
African-Americans executed in the US since 1977 were tried in front of 
all-white juries.

Eighty per cent of the more than 880 people put to death since 1977, were 
convicted of crimes involving whites, even though whites and blacks are the 
victims of murder in almost equal numbers, it added.

Race of murder victim has been shown to be a factor in capital sentencing 
in the US. The odds of a death sentence in cases in which blacks killed 
whites has been shown to be as much as 11 times higher than in the murder 
of a black victim by a white person, according to Amnesty.

Texas execution

Another execution of a black prisoner took place in the US on the same day.

Ynobe Matthews was declared dead at 00:16 GMT on Wednesday of a lethal 
injection which was administered eight minutes earlier at the Texas State 
Penitentiary in Huntsville.

Prison spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said Matthews, 27, convicted of the May 
2000 rape and murder of a 21-year-old white woman, whose house he then set 
alight, died without making a final statement.

A handful of anti-death penalty protesters demonstrated outside.

Matthews has renounced the long appeals that are normally filed on behalf 
of death row inmates in order, he said, to spare his and his victim's 
families from further anguish.


You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3D9293FD-0E72-4209-B667-BCCE0ACF711B.htm 



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