Illness on trial

With capital punishment unofficially on hold in North Carolina - there hasn't been an execution since 2006 - the death penalty isn't much in the news these days, or near the top of the General Assembly's agenda. Yet there's a common sense reform pending in the legislature that could bring more justice, and quite likely less cost, to certain murder trials in our state.

That would be to exempt people with a severe mental disability from the death penalty.

Don't we already do that?

Not really. The U.S. Supreme Court, rightly, has acted in recent years to spare juveniles and people with mental retardation from the death penalty, no matter their crime. There is a suggestion, in those cases, that people who are severely mentally ill - psychotic, wildly delusional, etc. - should not be executed either. But so far the nation's highest court has not ruled that way.

In North Carolina, defendants can raise an insanity defense, but it is rarely successful. And trials in which capital punishment is a possible outcome are more expensive to hold and always subject to higher-court appeals.

Yet, clearly, some murderers are severely mentally ill. We've had a recent example: the case of Abdullah Shareef, who was tried in Cumberland County and eventually sentenced to life without parole.

Six years ago Shareef stole two vehicles and used them to run down five men, killing one, Lonel Bass. It was an awful crime, and it stemmed from Shareef's untreated paranoid schizophrenia. Yet jurors rejected his insanity defense, so this was a death penalty case. At the trial's end, in the penalty phase, jurors decided on a life sentence rather than execution.

A better procedure, say Kristin Parks and John Tote, advocates for the mentally ill who wrote about the case and law on the opposite page last Sunday, would be to give judges the power to examine evidence, before a trial begins, regarding a defendant's mental state at the time of the crime. If the judge finds the defendant severely mentally disabled, the death penalty would be off the table and life without parole would be the punishment at stake. The resulting trial - or plea arrangement - could save the judicial system time and the taxpayers some money.

And the outcome would be the same as in the actual Shareef case. (Interestingly, if Shareef had succeeded with an insanity defense, he would have been sent to a mental hospital for an indeterminate stretch.)

The legislature, which convenes in May, has before it a bill to make this sensible change. The bill is carefully drafted and would apply only to defendants who are truly mentally disabled. It is not right to execute such people, even though it has occurred, and it is costly as well. The sooner the law is changed the better.