Just how crazy must a person be to be ruled incompetent for execution in the United States? Being profoundly mentally ill is not enough. You have to be deemed legally “insane.”<\/p>\n
At trial, the insanity defense generally hinges on a person’s inability to distinguish right from wrong or understand the “nature and quality” of his act. In the context of an impending execution, insanity means you cannot rationally comprehend that you are being put to death as a consequence of the crime you committed.<\/p>\n
In 2005, a Texas jury found that Andre Thomas, the subject of my in-depth companion piece (see box below), was not insane at the time of his crime.<\/p>\n
To put this in context, consider that Thomas was then, and still is, a delusional paranoid schizophrenic who hears voices\u2014from God, he believes\u2014telling him to do things. He carved out the organs of his four-year-old son, his estranged wife, and her 13-month-old daughter, and took them home in his pockets, believing that this would kill the demons inside them. In the days following his arrest, he insisted to a jailhouse nurse that his victims were still alive.<\/p>\n
And that’s not even the weirdest part of the story.<\/p>\n