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NEWS & LETTERS, JUNE 2003
Tennessee stays Paul Reid executionMemphis--Tennessee's rush to execute another prisoner last month was stopped three hours before Paul Reid was scheduled to die by lethal injection for murdering seven young employees of three fast food restaurants in 1999. Reid, who is mentally ill, halted his appeals early in the process. His sister appealed to the federal Sixth Circuit Court, contending Reid should have a full evidentiary hearing to prove his competence in making such decisions. The court agreed. Three doctors diagnosed Reid. All established that he was schizophrenic, one writing Reid is the “schizophrenic, paranoid type”; the second diagnosed "schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, most recent episode manic. His manic symptoms currently include grandiose behavior and delusions, such as being selected to breed with a millionaire's wife”; the third said Reid doesn't believe himself to be mentally ill, as do half of those suffering from schizophrenia. Despite such evidence, the Tennessee State Attorney General's Office rushed an appeal of the stay to the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to execute Reid as planned. But Reid, taking the stay as "a sign from god," decided to resume the appeals process. None of the 30 or 40 of us at the vigil on the night
before Reid was to be murdered by the state thought that he would live to see
the sun rise. Pete Gathje from the Tennessee Coalition Against State Killing led off the vigil by observing: "The State of Tennessee, in its usual wisdom, selected a date that has some significance. Tomorrow is national Holocaust Remembrance Day. One of the first group of people targeted by the Nazis were the mentally ill. They are people on the margins of society, and typically don't have a lot of defenders. Paul Reid, who is to be executed tonight, has a long history of mental illness dating back to his days in Texas, where he was found mentally incompetent by the court. But for the state of Tennessee, it doesn't matter that Reid himself has dropped his appeals and that the state will really be participating in a kind of state-assisted suicide tonight." Tennessee seems determined to execute the mentally ill. The only person executed in Tennessee in the last 40 years, Robert Glen Coe was mentally ill; and the next person scheduled to die on Tennessee's death row, Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman, also has a long history of serious mental illness and abuse (See March 2002 NEWS & LETTERS). All of us involved in the struggle to end the death penalty know that we will have to fight again for Reid sometime in the future. The struggle continues. --T.M. |
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