CHAPTER FOUR: HOW MANY MENTALLY ILL OFFENDERS DID HE EXECUTE?

 

 

            In the 1950s the American Law Institute established a definition for insanity in criminal trials. It said that a person would “not be responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality (wrongfulness) of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.”

            This “not guilty by reason of insanity” (NGRI) plea became distinctly unpopular in America when John Hinckley received this verdict after shooting Ronald Reagan. “He tried to kill the President; he should go to jail,” ran the popular opinion. Suddenly the nation was gripped by fears of no one ever going to jail again; anyone who did anything wrong would just plead insane and be set free. Following the Hinckley trial, the political columnists warned us, the entire nation would degenerate into moral and legal and criminal chaos.

            That threat could not have been further from the truth, since the insanity plea is so extremely rare and extremely unsuccessful. A 1991 eight-state study showed that the NGRI plea was used in only 1% of all criminal cases, and it was successful in only 25% of those pleas. So already only 0.25% of all defendants are being found NGRI. And of those few successful NGRI pleas, 80% were the result of agreement between the defense and prosecution that the defendant could not be held responsible for the crime, since 90% of the defendants had been diagnosed with a mental illness before the crime was even committed.[1]

            Another myth regarding the “not guilty by reason of insanity plea” is that anyone so determined just goes free. That’s not true. Those who are deemed dangerous to themselves or society are sent to secured mental institutions for treatment, and studies have shown that on average they are held at least as long or longer than those found guilty and sent to prison for similar crimes.[2] In many ways the NGRI plea can be more dangerous for a defendant, since a criminal usually comes up for release, but a mentally ill patient can be held indefinitely, so long as he or she may present a danger to themselves or society. John Hinckley remains incarcerated to this day.

            But all these dense and abstract and heady facts are lost on the Texas criminal justice system, where even the mentally ill are sent to die.

            Mentally ill . . . and mentally retarded. John Satterwhite brutally murdered Mary Davis during a convenience store robbery in 1979. His accomplice, Sharon Bell, agreed to testify against Mr. Satterwhite and was released from prison in 1986. No one has ever questioned Mr. Satterwhite’s guilt, or the need to protect society from him. Still, his case was controversial due to his mental retardation and mental illness.

            Mr. Satterwhite’s first conviction got thrown out because he was forced to meet with a psychiatrist, James “Dr. Death” Grigson, without his lawyer.[3] Then the problems started. At two competency hearings prior to his retrial, juries were twice unable to decide whether Mr. Satterwhite was mentally fit to stand trial. The third jury, after hearing testimony from a state psychiatrist who had met with Mr. Satterwhite clandestinely, outside of the presence of his lawyer, decided he was sane enough to understand the proceedings against him.

            At the second trial, a psychiatrist testified that Mr. Satterwhite had suffered from chronic paranoid schizophrenia since his teens. He also testified that Mr. Satterwhite was borderline mentally retarded, with an IQ of 74 plus or minus five points (70 being the cutoff). A second expert agreed with him. But the state psychiatrist testified that he was neither mentally ill nor mentally retarded, and Mr. Satterwhite was sentenced to death. After the trial, two state medical documents came to light which had been suppressed prior to trial, both of which supported the defense’s claim that Mr. Satterwhite was mentally ill.[4]

            Texas could have permanently incarcerated John Satterwhite, protecting the public from him forever. But the state decided that this was best done through execution, even if he was mentally ill and mentally retarded or semi-retarded. Governor George W. Bush denied any reprieve, and Mr. Satterwhite was executed August 16, 2000.

            Just let me die on a full moon. Larry Robison began hearing voices and acting strangely as a teenager. He claimed to have secret paranormal mental powers, being able to read people’s minds and move objects from a distance. He joined the Army but was discharged after only a year, since his officers were unsympathetic to Mr. Robison’s efforts to control his fellow soldiers people through supernatural mental powers.

            Larry Robison’s parents had been trying to get him help all along. He had already been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic at the age of 21. They did not have the training to care for him on their own, and as public school teachers they didn’t have the money for a private mental institution. They repeatedly warned the mental health authorities in the state of Texas about his erratic and increasingly aggressive behavior, but the state just told them that there was nothing they could do. He was shuffled in and out of mental hospitals, going in after aggressive behavior and being released after a period of medicated passivity. He received no regular, ongoing treatment. Mr. Robison wasn’t on his parents’ insurance and he didn’t have his own, so he just had to tough it out. Most frighteningly, the authorities told the Robisons: “He hasn’t harmed anybody yet, so there’s nothing we can do.”[5]

            On August 10, 1982 Larry Robison gave the state of Texas something to do. Voices in his head--coming through clocks in his room--spewed out warnings about Old Testament prophecies of the Apocalypse while also telling him to murder, behead, and mutilate his roommate, Bruce Gardner. He did. Mr. Robison then went next door and murdered four of his neighbors. When authorities arrested him, Mr. Robison told them that he had committed the murders in order to “find God.”[6]

            Once in jail, evidence of Mr. Robison’s insanity continued to accumulate. Several of his relatives had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a hereditary disease, but these diagnoses had been hidden out of family shame. His younger sister was also diagnosed as schizophrenic. Again, the state of Texas refused to help her for seven long years, but when the parents persisted and as Larry Robison’s story became more and more notorious, the state finally agreed to admit her. “Texas doesn’t take care of its mentally ill,” says Lois Robison, Larry’s mom. “A lot of states don’t but most all of them in the nation take better care of them than Texas does . . . They don’t want to put out the money to do preventive treatment. They’d rather spend the money on executions.”[7]

            The four prosecutors developing the case against Larry Robison recognized his past history of mental illness and were willing to accept an insanity plea in exchange for life in a mental institution. But the Tarrant County prosecutor overruled them; he wanted Larry Robison executed. In the courtroom, most evidence of Mr. Robison’s madness was ruled inadmissible, so the jury knew little of it. They gave him a death sentence.[8]

            Mr. Robison’s family appealed, hopeful that state or federal courts might intervene on the basis of his mental illness. Even the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed his execution at one point, doubtful as to whether or not he was competent to undergo execution. When asked what the execution would be like, Mr. Robison had replied that he felt like “a little kid at Christmas time waiting for Santa Claus to come.”[9]

            Often, the mentally ill on death row don’t quite understand what’s happening to them as they’re being executed. In Ford v. Wainwright (1986), the Supreme Court ruled that a criminal can’t be executed unless they grasp that they’re being executed, and what that execution entails. But at the hearing in which Mr. Robison confused execution with Santa Claus, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided that Mr. Robison did in fact understand his situation and what was happening to him, and that the execution could therefore proceed.

            His family appealed to the federal courts, but it was finally Mr. Robison who put a stop to it all. Seemingly deranged, he demanded that his lawyers cease filing such appeals based on his mental illness, but only if the state agreed to execute him on the night of a full moon. The state agreed. Governor George W. Bush denied any reprieve, and Larry Robison was executed on January 21, 2000, in the silvery light of a perfectly round moon.

            Standardlessness. How could mentally ill inmates be executed in a modern society? Texas does in fact have a law exempting the “mentally incompetent” from execution. The problem is that, prior to and during Gov. Bush’s tenure, there were no legal standards to determine what “mentally incompetent” meant. Generally, psychiatrists testified in court as to a defendant’s mental incompetence, but there were no guidelines for the psychiatrists to determine whether a defendant was mentally competent or not.

            There was no peer review and no oversight mechanism to evaluate a psychiatrist’s testimony. There were no statutory standards of evaluation. Expert witnesses could disregard hospital and school records, and they could ignore credible professional tests, past and present. There was no legal requirement that psychiatrists adhere to ethical standards of their profession in their testimony, nor was an evaluator legally bound to consider the testimony of a suspect’s physician. Evaluators were expected to address mental illness alone, without taking into consideration such other determinants of mental competence as mental retardation and brain damage. Expert witnesses did not have to test a suspect’s comprehension, and no one was legally bound to objectively assess that the suspect had a substantial understanding of anything. At Vernon State Hospital in Texas, staff actually tutored their mentally incapacitated patients to correctly answer the competency questionnaire for legal determination to stand trial.[10]

            The result was, as noted above, the execution of some severely mentally ill inmates. Kenneth Granviel was clearly responsible for several horrifically brutal murders. Two treating psychiatrists and one treating psychologist at Rusk State Hospital testified at a competency hearing that Mr. Granviel was schizophrenic and incompetent to stand trial. They reached this conclusion independently after 23 days of observation, and each was professionally indifferent to the outcome of the case. The prosecution then introduced two state psychiatrists who had never interviewed Mr. Granviel but testified on the basis of hypothetical questions. The jury sided with the state, and Mr. Granviel was executed by Gov. Bush in February 1996.[11]

            Similarly, Emile Duhamel was sentenced to death despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia, major depression, and an IQ measured at 54 – multiple mental incapacity. The state of Texas was spared his execution; a diabetic, Mr. Duhamel died in his death row cell in July 1998 during a 110 degree Texas heat wave.[12]

            Lessons unlearned: Larry Robison’s insanity caused five brutal murders and his own execution. It also caused significant policy changes in Texas’ mental health system. Pushing tax cuts in an era of prosperity, as late as 1999 Gov. Bush dramatically slashed funding for the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. Prior to running for President, he cut $5 million from funding for medications and another $2.4 million from funding for mental hospital beds. Mental hospitals in Texas now have to turn away patients even more deserving than Larry Robison, waiting for them to hurt people before being treated, incarcerated, or executed.[13]