Experts’ letter a bid to save prisoner’s life
His mental illness precludes execution, governor is told
A cadre of mental-health professionals, including 24 who practice in Arkansas, signed a letter delivered to Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Wednesday, pleading that he stop the upcoming execution of Jack Greene.
Later in the day, Hutchinson also was sent a letter from American Bar Association President Hilarie Bass, who expressed concerns that carrying out the execution would be contrary to the group’s stance against executing the mentally ill. Greene’s attorneys say Greene is delusional.
Greene, 62, is the oldest prisoner on Arkansas’ death row, having been condemned to die in 1992 for beating retired Johnson County minister Sidney Burnett and then fatally shooting him inside Burnett’s home. At the time, Greene was on the run after killing his brother in North Carolina. His execution by lethal injection is set for Nov. 9.
For more than a decade, Greene has been housed behind a solid metal door, his federal public defenders wrote in a recent filing seeking to halt the execution.
Greene’s solitary confinement has exacerbated mental-health problems that existed prior to his crimes, the attorneys argue. They say Greene has developed a “psychotic disorder” that causes him to believe his attorneys and guards are conspiring against him, and he habitually stuffs his ears and nose with tissue paper.
Mentally ill people are not exempted from the death penalty, though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that prisoners cannot be executed if they are insane and unable to understand the reason for their punishment, according to the American Psychological Association.
The letter from the psychological community, which was announced and
released by Greene’s attorneys, calls on the governor to show mercy.
“Although we personally hold different positions on the death penalty as policy, we are united in the belief that the execution of a man as mentally ill as Jack Greene would be morally and ethically wrong,” the letter reads.
During a hearing before the state Parole Board earlier this month, Greene denied he was mentally ill in a rambling statement in which he repeated his belief that a conspiracy exists against him. The Parole Board found Greene unworthy of clemency.
Through a spokesman, the governor released a statement Wednesday saying he would continue to review Greene’s case.
Before a series of planned executions in April, similar letters were sent to the governor, signed by the former Bar Association
president and hundreds of faith leaders. While four of the eight executions were halted by courts, Hutchinson made no attempt to call off any of the other four. He later granted clemency to one man spared by the courts.
None of the 28 signatories of Wednesday’s letter had personally examined Greene, a member of his legal team said in an email. However, a neuropsychologist and a psychiatrist have examined Greene in the past decade, and their reports were cited heavily in legal filings that were likely reviewed by those who signed the letter, said Tristin Aaron, who’s on Greene’s legal team.
Of the Arkansans who signed the letter, 13 were licensed by the state’s Psychology Board, according to online records. Others included social workers and mental-health counselors. Two of the signatures listed offices in Delaware, and one each came from Virginia and Indiana.
“It’s concerning to me that someone would be executed if they were currently psychotic
and not aware of what is happening to them,” said Tisha Deen, a licensed psychologist in Little Rock, when reached by phone Tuesday.
Deen said she is generally opposed to the death penalty because of the proportion of mentally ill people on death row.
She said she was not intimately familiar with Greene’s case but was concerned that he would be executed without careful evaluation.
In a complaint filed last week in Jefferson County Circuit Court, Greene’s attorneys wrote that Department of Correction
Director Wendy Kelley or her subordinates “impeded” their attempts at finding reasonable grounds for having Greene declared incompetent by preventing a prison mental-health counselor from talking with Greene’s legal team.
Kelley also has denied a
request to personally declare Greene incompetent for execution, the attorneys wrote in their filings.
A court hearing has been scheduled for Nov. 2 in Pine Bluff over the complaint, which seeks to have Greene declared incompetent for execution.