Capital Punishment 2007 stats

Lately there have been stories in the news about people that were given the death penalty(capital punishment) and executed only to find out later through  modern DNA testing that the wrong person was killed.  That in and of itself is enough to give pause before taking some one’s life for a crime, but what about when the person is seriously mentally ill and symptomatic when a crime is committed?

 Amnesty International believes that “The death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights. It is the premeditated and cold-blooded killing of a human being by the state in the name of justice. It violates the right to life…It is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. There can never be any justification for torture or for cruel treatment.”

At the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) annual convention in San Francisco last summer  families of murder victims  joined with families of persons with mental illness who have been executed to speak out against the death penalty.

Double Tragedies, a report released at the convention, calls the death penalty “inappropriate and unwarranted” for people with severe mental disorders and “a distraction from problems within the mental health system that contributed or even directly lead to tragic violence.”

The report calls for treatment and prevention, not execution. It is available online at www.nami.org/doubletragedies.

A  joint project of NAMI and Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR), the report  is based on extensive interviews with 21 family members from 10 states, including  Texas which has the highest rate of capital punishment in the United States.

Most people with mental illness are not violent, many preferring to isolate and have little social contact. When violent tragedies occur it’s usually because the person has fallen through the cracks of a broken mental health care system.  Tragedies are compounded when all the families involved on all sides suffer.

Double Tragedies identifies an “intersection” of family concerns and makes four basic recommendations:

• Ban the death penalty for people with severe mental illnesses.
• Reform the mental health care system to focus on treatment.
• Recognize the needs of families of murder victims through rights to information and participation in criminal or mental health proceedings.
• Families of executed persons also should be recognized as victims and given the assistance due to any victims of traumatic loss.

Since 1976 when the Supreme Court  found capital punishment to be Constitutional, through June 3, 2009, 1,167 people have been executed in the U.S.

Hundreds of people with mental illness have been put to death in the United States and hundreds more are awaiting execution.