I usually don’t pay much attention to the local news, but in the break room at work today this headline caught my eye. First few of ‘graphs:
With his wild-haired Charles Manson look and a long history of delusional thinking, self-inflicted injuries and gibberish speech, Steven Kenneth Staley, when off his anti-psychotic medication, is the picture of madness.
Found guilty in 1991 of murdering a Fort Worth restaurant manager during a botched holdup, Staley, 43, has spent much of the past 15 years on death row, in and out of a schizophrenic haze.
Claiming doctors are trying to poison him, he regularly refuses to take his medicine, leaving him with a shaky grasp of his legal circumstances.
The state, however, is trying to force him to take his medication. So that he’s competent to be executed. As a death penalty opponent, and a person who’s generally against forcible medication, this is doubly appalling. Not only does the state want to use its ultimate authority to kill a man, which it certainly does not have the right to do, they want to forcibly medicate him for the express purpose of making it legal to put a needle into his arm. Disgusting.
I suppose that whether he was competent to face the death penalty at the time of the murder is a relevant question, and as he was found guilty it seems that question has been answered in the affirmative. However, according to state and Federal precedent, he must be competent at the time of his execution. He obviously isn’t, and the state wants to force him into competency for the express purpose of causing his death. Prisoners may only be forcibly medicated when they pose a danger to themselves or to others, Staley has not been reported as either (aside from the obvious murder conviction, which he was competent for), and therefore the state doesn’t have a compelling reason to force medication upon him. Other than the bloodlust of the Tarrant County prosecutor, that is.
Staley’s case doesn’t make a good one for death penalty opponents to hang our hats on, but it does demonstrate the pernicious lengths to which the state will go just to make sure some people end up dead.
