Execution delayed for Alabama inmate in ’85 officer killing

MONTGOMERY, ALA. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday delayed the execution of an Alabama inmate after his attorneys argued that dementia had left the 67-year-old unable to understand his looming execution.

The decision came about two hours after Vernon Madison had been scheduled to receive a lethal injection at a southwest Alabama prison.

Madison was sentenced to death for the 1985 killing of Mobile Police Cpl. Julius Schulte. Schulte, a 22-year veteran of the police force, had responded to a report of a missing child placed by Madison’s then-girlfriend. Prosecutors said Madison crept up and shot Schulte in the back of the head as he sat in his police car.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued the stay to consider arguments from Madison’s attorneys. Alabama prison system spokesman Bob Horton said the state attorney general’s office told him the execution would not go forward Thursday night because of the stay.

Madison’s lawyers say strokes and dementia have left Madison unable to remember his crime or understand his looming execution. They argued executing someone in such a poor mental condition would violate the ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

“It is undisputed that Mr. Madison suffers from vascular dementia as a result of multiple serious strokes in the last two years and no longer has a memory of the commission of the crime for which he is to be executed. His mind and body are failing,” wrote attorney Bryan Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative.