His attorneys told The Washington Post that Madison has “an inability to rationally understand why the state of Alabama is seeking to execute him”.
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The U.S. Supreme Court says the execution of an Alabama inmate will not go forward Thursday. But a divided 4-4 court on Thursday evening maintained the stay ordered by an appellate court. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted the execution, saying it wanted to review claims that the 65-year-old inmate is mentally incompetent because of strokes and dementia.
The attorney general’s office asked the appellate court to let the execution proceed. Prosecutors said Madison later crept up and shot Schulte in the back of the head as he sat in his police vehicle.
The Alabama attorney general’s office is asking the high court to let the execution proceed as planned before the death warrant expires at midnight. The state argues that a county court last month found Madison competent for execution.
The Hurst case continues to reverberate in Florida, which has not carried out an execution since the justices ruled and where the state’s highest court is weighing action that could overturn death sentences for almost 400 inmates.
The appeal came after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the stay request from Madison.
Three judges on the 11th Circuit said there should be time to review lawyers’ claims that it would be unconstitutional to execute Madison because strokes and dementia have left him mentally incompetent.
An expert appointed by the Mobile circuit court came to a different conclusion, saying while “there’s no question Mr. Madison had deteriorated a great deal”, he was able to give details about the history of his case and talk about specific things. “In finding him competent, the state court unreasonably imposed a standard more restrictive than what the law requires and failed to consider critical facts of Mr. Madison’s dementia and retrograde amnesia”.
AL.com reports the execution is scheduled for 6 p.m.at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.
Madison will become the second person executed after the state modified its lethal injection admixture more than two years ago and the state’s 58th execution since 1983, when Alabama resumed capital punishments following the federal ban.
Vernon Madison spent the better part of three decades struggling to get off of Alabama’s death row, and now a federal appeals court has agreed to grant him a stay of execution.
Madison was arrested and charged for the murder of Mobile police officer Julius Schulte in April 1985. Prosecutors said Madison crept up and shot Schulte in the back of the head as he sat in his police vehicle.
Attorneys for the state said a lower court, after a hearing, found Madison competent. Madison knew he was in prison for murder, but indicated that he did not believe he killed anyone and doesn’t remember the name of the name of the man he was convicted of killing, Goff said.
Madison was convicted of killing Mobile police Officer Julius Schulte.
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An inmate in Alabama named Christopher E. Brooks argued that Alabama’s death-sentencing system is “virtually identical” to the nullified Florida system, but the justices rejected his appeal and he was executed by lethal injection in January.
