Brannan, who served in Vietnam, had argued that he developed post-traumatic stress disorder after his experiences in combat.
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There are those who disagree with the report’s stance.
They presented the case of Louis Jones Jr., a decorated soldier from the first Gulf War and Grenada with no previous criminal record who was given capital punishment in 2003 after his allegations of PTSD following a war incident weren’t acknowledged by the prosecutors. “With PTSD, you can get the death penalty and sometimes it can be used against you”, Dieter said.
Though there are no solid statistics as to the exact number of veterans on death row, the report estimated that about ten percent of inmates, or at least 300, scheduled to be executed are military veterans, and scores more vets have been executed already.
“At a time in which the death penalty is being imposed less and less, it is disturbing that so many veterans who were mentally and emotionally scarred while serving their country are now facing execution”, Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said in a statement.
The American public is starting to recognize the unique pressures veterans face when they return home from war, but the legal system has been slow to accommodate them, said Art Cody, the legal director at the Veterans Defense Program of the NY State Defenders Association.
Over 800,000 Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD, according to the report.
In 2009, the Supreme Court threw out the death sentence for a Korean War veteran, George Porter, who had been convicted in the 1986 murders of an ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend.
Legal rulings have tended to dismiss the connection between battle trauma and home front violence – even amid an 89 percent rise in homicides by veterans following the invasion of Afghanistan, compared with a six-year period before 9/11, the report states.
A defendant’s military history is a “double-edged sword”, said Ken Rose, a defense attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina who represents clients sentenced to death, including Davis, because lawyers, juries and judges can interpret it as both a mitigating and an aggravating factor. “But a few veterans with debilitating scars from their time in combat… have been judged to be the “worst of the worst” criminals, deprived of mercy, sentenced to death, and executed”.
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The report suggested interim steps to ensure that the mental stability of the person on trial be examined whenever capital charges are brought against a military veteran. And it’s Dieter’s belief (he’s far from alone in this) that the impact of the disorder is rarely given enough consideration at trial-especially by prosecutors and judges, but even by the defense. Additionally, testimony about military culture should be allowed as mitigating evidence in capital trials involving veterans, and potential jurors should be questioned about their views about the military. The report was published on the lights of the upcoming Veteran Day this Wednesday. Judges and juries are often unsympathetic to the claim.
