Hinrichtung am 25. Januar verhindern!

Injustice riddles the state’s efforts to get Vernon Madison to the execution chamber, a pursuit that has now gone on for nearly 33 years. In 1987, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals found that the prosecution had engaged in racially discriminatory jury selection tactics when it summarily dismissed all seven qualified African Americans from the jury pool at the 1985 trial. Then, at the 1990 retrial, the prosecution engaged in misconduct when it elicited expert testimony partly based on facts not in evidence before the court. Again the state Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction. At the third trial, the elected judge overrode the jury’s vote for a life sentence, effectively giving the state its fourth attempt to achieve the death sentence denied it twice by its own misconduct and then by the jurors after they had heard evidence of Vernon Madison’s mental disability.

International law and standards on the use of the death penalty hold that it may not be imposed or carried out on people with mental or intellectual disabilities. This applies whether the disability was relevant at the time of their alleged commission of the crime or developed after the person was sentenced to death. In the USA, the 1986 Supreme Court decision, Ford v. Wainwright, prohibits the execution of those who are mentally "incompetent" – those who cannot understand the reason for or reality of their punishment. In Panetti v. Quarterman in 2007, the Court elaborated that under Ford, "A prisoner’s awareness of the State’s rationale for an execution is not the same as a rational understanding of it… Gross delusions stemming from a severe mental disorder may put an awareness of a link between a crime and its punishment in a context so far removed from reality that the punishment can serve no proper purpose." Yet, on this issue, Vernon Madison faces injustice wrought by the AEDPA.

Signed into law on 24 April 1996 by President Bill Clinton, the AEDPA compromises fairness in pursuit of finality. In 1998, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions wrote that this legislation had "further jeopardized the implementation of the right to a fair trial as provided for in the ICCPR [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights] and other international instruments". The AEDPA placed unprecedented restrictions on prisoners raising claims of constitutional violations. The US Supreme Court has said that under the AEDPA federal courts must operate a "highly deferential standard for evaluating state-court rulings, which demands that state court decisions be given the benefit of the doubt". When the Supreme Court overturned the 11th Circuit’s incompetency finding in Vernon Madison’s case, three of the Justices noted that "the issue of whether a State may administer the death penalty to a person whose disability leaves them without memory of his commission of a capital offense is a substantial question not yet addressed by the Court". It was an issue, they said, that warranted a "full airing", but that the AEDPA’s "restraints… preclude consideration of the question" in Vernon Madison’s case. Without the AEDPA’s strictures, the 11th Circuit’s finding that Vernon Madison was incompetent for execution would surely have been allowed to stand (on AEDPA, see also https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr51/0004/2015/en/).

When the 11th Circuit issued its decision, the two judges in the majority noted that the court-appointed psychologist upon whose testimony the Alabama judge had relied in finding Madison competent for execution "simply wasn’t looking at the right issues" for a competency determination under Ford/Panetti. Even the dissenting third judge expressly acknowledged that this court-appointed expert "may not have performed the most exhaustive of examinations, may not have asked the best questions, and may not have provided the most pristine opinion". In December 2017, Vernon Madison’s lawyers presented newly emerged evidence that the psychologist had been suspended from practicing psychology after being arrested and charged on four counts of possession of a controlled substance, one of which occurred shortly after the competency hearing for Vernon Madison.

There have been 1,466 executions in the USA since judicial killing resumed there in 1977 under new capital statutes approved by the Supreme Court in 1976. Alabama accounts for 61 of these executions, including three of the 23 conducted in 2017. There has been one execution in the USA so far this year. Amnesty International opposes the death penalty, unconditionally. Today some 142 countries are abolitionist in law or practice.