WASHINGTON – Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer on Tuesday posed the idea of expanding the reason that a person cannot be executed to include severe dementia in a case involving a 68-year-old Alabama man with dementia who murdered a police officer 33 years ago.
“We all know someone with dementia. Think of them. Would you execute that person?” Breyer asked the attorney for the state of Alabama, which wants to go forward with the death sentence.
The case, Madison v. Alabama, could block executions for a growing number of elderly prisoners on death row if they suffer from a mental disability like severe dementia.
If the court decides that dementia falls under the category of lunacy, 68-year-old Vernon Madison would be deemed too incompetent to be executed. He was sentenced to death in 1985 for killing Mobile, Alabama police officer Julius Schulte, who was responding to a domestic violence call.
Madison’s lawyer said he can’t recall any of the details of his crime.
In the last two years, Madison suffered two strokes that left his brain function deeply impaired and suffers from severe vascular dementia, according to his attorneys at the Equal Justice Initiative.
Breyer suggested an expansion of the definition of lunacy to include having a “severe mental inability to orient a time or place of the offense.”
If the other justices agree, forms of severe dementia affecting memory would fall under the legal definition of lunacy. That would mean executions of those who meet the definition would be a violation of the Eighth Amendment, designed to prevent “cruel and unusual punishments.”
But Alabama’s attorney responded to Breyer that “nothing about his condition deters the state from seeking retribution for a horrible crime.”
Justice Elena Kagan asked attorneys for both sides, “Is there a place where courts have been clear that dementia can fold under the definition of lunacy?”
Both lawyers said no, although Alabama’s attorney reminded the court of its decision two years ago that determined Madison competent enough to acknowledge both his sentencing and crime.
The 2016 decision, however, was based on precedent set in two previous death penalty cases. The high court ruled that Madison was competent because his defense attorneys were unable to prove his lunacy with examples of “psychosis, delusions or insanity,” according to Madison’s attorney.
Expert testimony from Dr. John Goff revealed in 2016 that Madison was unable to remember committing his crime and that his mental and physical state was rapidly deteriorating. He was unable to walk or go to the bathroom independently. But Goff acknowledged that his evidence was irrelevant because of the narrow legal standard for lunacy.