BAN ON EXECUTING MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE ADVANCES
Ban would apply to defendants with active psychotic symptoms
A state Senate panel voted Monday to bar the execution of people with serious mental illnesses.
The same bill failed last year, but a last-minute move by Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Warm Springs, will send the legislation to the Senate floor.
The Senate Courts of Justice Committee voted for the bill 8-6.
The proposed law would not prevent people with mental illnesses from being found guilty of crimes. The defense would still have to meet existing standards to prove someone not guilty by reason of insanity.
Last year, the Courts of Justice Committee sent a similar proposal to the state Crime Commission for study, but that body didn’t act.
“That’s just not right that we put people with that kind of disability to death,” Deeds said after Monday’s vote.
Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Moneta, one of two Republican members of the committee who voted for the ban, said that when the Crime Commission didn’t act, he believed the General Assembly had to.
“When you’re dealing with serious mental illness, that’s a disqualification” for the death penalty, Stanley said.
The ban, which is meant to apply to defendants with active psychotic symptoms, also won support from Senate Minority Leader Dick Saslaw, DSpringfield, who has been a strong defender of the death penalty generally.
The measure’s sponsor, state Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington, compared the measure to Virginia’s ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities and juveniles.
The two main reasons the U.S. Supreme Court has cited as justification for the death penalty — retribution and deterrence — don’t apply to people with serious mental illness when they are too delusional to understand what they’ve done or to be deterred from doing wrong, said Rhonda Thissen, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness’ Virginia chapter.
The Senate committee also approved ending the current practice of suspending drivers licenses when defendants can’t keep up payments with fines and court fees.
That measure won backing from an unusual alliance of advocates for the poor and the conservative Americans for Prosperity. Gov. Ralph Northam has supported ending license suspensions.
Both the death penalty and license bills now go to the full Senate and, if they pass there, to the House of Delegates.