The State of Texas is preparing to execute Gerald Eldridge who was convicted more than 15 years ago for the murder of a Houston woman as she begged for her life and the murder of her nine-year-old daughter with a bullet between the girl’s eyes fired at close range. Eldridge had already spent eight years in prison for an attempted murder before he committed the double murder. Eldridge’s attorney Lee Wilson is trying to convince the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that his client is too mentally ill to be executed. The basis for Wilson’s request for a delay of the execution until Eldridge can undergo additional psychologically testing is as follows:

• Eldridge believes he is married to a woman named Jennifer
• His brother each day takes him to his job where he builds boats
• Someone is poisoning his food with battery acid, bleach and human waste
• Prison guards are showing videos of his family to other inmates
• Prison guards are forging letters on his behalf
• He believes everyone has their own channel and that someone is trying to change his channel

Attorney Wilson has supported his request for an execution delay before the court of appeals with a report prepared by Houston psychologist Mary Alice Conroy who believes Eldridge’s mental condition should be thoroughly investigated, although the doctor was not prepared to say the condemned inmate is mentally incompetent. “Gerald Eldridge may be suffering from a significant psychotic disorder the result of which is confusion, poor contact with reality, hallucinations and possible delusional thinking,” she stated in her report. “In such a state he would be highly unlikely to understand the concept of execution or its rationale.”

The Harris County District Attorney is not buying the insanity issue. Assistant District Attorney Inger Hampton invokes the state’s own psychiatric report from Houston psychiatrist Mark Moeller which concluded: “Mr. Eldridge’s presentation is not consistent with any type of mental disorder. His answers and assertions are bizarre and not congruent with mental disorders. His demeanor appeared theatrical and contrived. His responses and affect seemed purposeful and measure in a way unlike that of a severely mentally ill person.”

The courts will have to decide which of the dueling doctors is correct in keeping with U.S. Supreme Court precedent that the State cannot execute a mentally incompetent individual.

But why not? Why should an insane condemned person be spared execution when a sane person can be put to death? Why is it any more “cruel and unusual” to execute a crazy man who believes prison guards put excrement in his last meal than a sane man who accepts the last meal and eats it without complaint or paranoia?

The problem inherent in the notion that it’s somehow wrong to execute a crazy man but okay to execute a sane one is that it penalizes normal thinking while rewarding abnormal thinking. It’s no more cruel to execute a man who thinks he’s married to some woman named Jennifer than it is to execute a man who knows he’s not married to anyone.

If normal, rational thinking is not a legal or moral prohibition against a state-imposed execution, then delusional thinking should not be either.

SOURCE:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/6715922.html