Virginia (USA): schizophrenic to be executed on 10 June

Amnistía Internacional publicou unha nota de prensa (9 – V – 2008) sobre Percy Levar Walton. Falamos dun caso de pena capital particularmente aberrante, xa que este home é esquizofrénico, e xa estaba enfermo cando cometeu os asasinatos polos que foi condenado á morte. A execución está prevista para o próximo 10 de xuño.

A nota de prensa leva por título “USA (Virginia): Death penalty / Legal concern: Percy Levar Walton”. Copio un extracto do seu contido:

Levar Walton, who suffers from serious mental illness, is scheduled to be executed in Virginia on 10 June. He was sentenced to death in 1997 for the murders of an elderly white couple, Elizabeth and Jesse Hendrick, aged 81 and 80, and a 33-year-old black man, Archie Moore, in the town of Danville in November 1996.

In 1999, three mental health experts concluded that Levar Walton suffers from severe schizophrenia and was probably suffering from this mental illness at the time of the crime. Walton, who was 18 years and one month old at the time of the murders, had displayed signs of emerging mental illness since the age of 16. He manifested bizarre beliefs and inappropriate behaviour after his arrest, in pre-trial custody, and during the trial. [...]

The defence asked for a mental health expert, and the trial judge appointed a psychologist. After a series of meetings with Levar Walton, the psychologist developed serious doubts about his competence to stand trial, finding that Walton’s articulation of his thoughts was incomprehensible. He was particularly troubled by Levar Walton’s notion that execution did not result in permanent death. The psychologist recommended that Walton be placed in a secure psychiatric hospital. This was rejected by the trial judge. [...]

Virginia accounts for 98 of the 1,100 executions in the USA since judicial killing resumed in 1977. In 1999, Virginia’s then Governor, James Gilmore, commuted the death sentence of Calvin Swann on grounds of his schizophrenia from which he had suffered since his late teens. Swann was tried in front of the same judge, by the same prosecutor, and with the same defence lawyer, as Percy Levar Walton. [...]

Enlaces relacionados:

• Coalición Mundial contra a Pena de Morte
• Death Penalty Information Center
• National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty