Gov. Bill Lee should commute Stephen Michael West's sentence to life without parole because of the inmate's severe mental illness and because he did not kill the victims in the crime.
For the 2nd time in less than a year, Tennessee is set to execute a person with severe mental illness. Both cases dramatically illustrate why doing so is highly questionable.
In 2018, Tennessee executed Billy Irick, who had severe mental illness at the time of his crime, and as a result fell well outside the “worst of the worst” for whom the United States Supreme Court has said the death penalty is reserved. The same can be said of Stephen Michael West, whom the state plans to execute next week.
Unlike Irick and most people who are sentenced to death, West didn’t kill anyone. While he did rape 1 of the 2 victims in his case, it was his co-defendant who stabbed both of them to death, and who was clearly the instigator of the crimes.
Further, West’s life history is beyond horrific. It started with birth in a mental hospital and continued with repeated beatings by his mentally ill mother. As a child, he was once swung against the wall so hard that he was literally "knocked cross-eyed" and required multiple operations to correct his sight problems. He also suffered multiple bone fractures; his ankles alone were broken 7 times.
West's mental condition is relevant in this case
Yet the jury that sentenced him to death heard virtually none of this. The true account of who committed the murders was never presented to the jury. And his parents, who paid for his defense, wanted to keep their family life out of the public eye.
Thus, one reason West should not be executed is because, like Irick, he is not one of the "worst of the worst." West, like Irick, obviously committed a terrible crime. If not legally insane, West deserves serious punishment. But the death sentence is meant only for the truly depraved, and West does not fit that category.
Furthermore, even if West was fully culpable for capital murder at the time of the crime, his current mental condition is also relevant to whether he should be executed.
In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed as a constitutional matter what virtually every state had already provided by statute: that people who are incompetent to be executed must have their death sentences commuted to life.
Lee should do the right thing and commute West's sentence
The standard for competence to be executed is very low, and back in 2001 a court found, in effect, that West met it. But West’s mental state has deteriorated to the point that he might not meet the competency test today, were it not for the heavy antipsychotic drugs now being administered to him by the physicians at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.
Even the state’s doctors concede that West is suffering from schizoaffective disorder and several other major mental disorders that are held in check only by the medication.
An American Psychiatric Association Task Force has stated that treating a condemned prisoner for the purpose of enabling an execution “violates the fundamental ethical norms of the mental health professions.” While there is no indication that the state’s doctors are medicating West solely to ensure his execution, or that their goal is anything other than alleviating suffering, the fact remains that their treatment may well be what is making execution possible.
Given Stephen Michael West’s lifelong impairment and his current tenuous mental condition, the state of Tennessee - which at this late point in the process is represented solely by Governor Bill Lee - should commute his sentence to life without parole.
Source: The Tennessean, Opinion; Christopher Slobogin, August 9, 2019. Christopher Slobogin is the Vanderbilt Law School's Milton R. Underwood Chair in Law Director, Criminal Justice Program, and an Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
