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| Ohio Executes Schizophrenic Inmate Despite Outcry |
| By Reuters |
| Published: 06/15/2001 |
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The state of Ohio, ignoring protests internationally and at home, on Thursday executed a man depicted by his lawyers as a schizophrenic too mentally ill to understand what was happening to him. Jay Scott, 48, convicted of killing an elderly Cleveland delicatessen owner in 1983, was pronounced dead at 9:08 p.m. EDT after an injection of lethal chemicals at a state prison at Lucasville. He had exhausted all appeals after the U.S. Supreme Court and Ohio Gov. Bob Taft refused on Wednesday to prevent his execution. Scott received a final meal of fried fish, hot sauce and a soft drink several hours before being put to death. Described by witnesses as very calm in his final moments, Scott asked authorities in his last words before the execution to tell his family: 'Don't worry. Tell them I'm all right.' It was the third time in less than two months Scott had faced execution. On April 17 and again on May 15, courts ordered a halt just minutes before he was to die. In the latter instance, prison officials had already placed tubes in his arms to prepare him for the injection of deadly chemicals when the process was halted. Amnesty International and the European Union had both appealed to Ohio to spare Scott's life. Sweden, the current EU president, signed the letter to the Ohio governor on behalf of the group, saying it 'opposes the death penalty in all cases and promotes universal abolition.' Death penalty opponents in Ohio had also campaigned to save Scott. Jim Tobin, associate director of the Catholic Conference of Ohio, said the execution would be 'unnecessary and cruel.' Ohio had carried out only one execution since it reinstated the death penalty in 1981, that of Wilford Berry, who voluntarily dropped his appeals. Berry was executed on Feb. 19, 1999. Scott was the first person executed against his will in the state since the death penalty was reinstated. His execution came just three days after that of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and at a time when the United States faces international outrage and domestic opposition to the widespread use of the death penalty. Polls have indicated, however, that a majority of Americans still support capital punishment. President Bush has been forced to defend U.S. policies on the death penalty during his current trip to Europe, where there is strong opposition to capital punishment. As it happened, he was in Sweden on Thursday at a summit of EU leaders. Scott's lawyers said he had a long history of untreated mental illness, including schizophrenia, that made him incompetent and unable to realize why he was to be executed. But courts at several levels had rejected that argument, ruling that Scott was mentally competent to face his sentence. He was convicted of killing shop owner Vinnie Prince, 74, during a planned robbery with three other men. He was subsequently given a second death sentence for killing security guard Alexander Jones at a restaurant just 13 hours after the first slaying. That conviction was thrown out by an appeals court because a juror had read news accounts of Scott's earlier death sentence. One of 11 children born to alcoholic and abusive parents, Scott never received treatment for mental illness, although a brother, also schizophrenic, had been in and out of institutions, his lawyers said. Scott's attorneys argued that his original lawyers in the delicatessen murder provided inadequate counsel by failing to raise the issue of his mental fitness during the sentencing phase that might have spared his life. While in prison, Scott displayed increasingly 'bizarre' behavior, including screaming fits and paranoid fantasies, according to a psychiatrist hired by his lawyers. |
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