Madison was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. on May 12, but he was granted a stay Thursday morning by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
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EJI attorneys filed an additional motion with the Alabama Supreme Court in light of the Hurst case and another Alabama death penalty case under review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Madison was convicted of killing Mobile police Officer Julius Schulte.
Madison was convicted of shooting Schulte in the head as he sat in his police auto after responding to a call about a domestic dispute involving Madison.
“Mr. Madison now speaks in (a) slurred manner, is legally blind, and can no longer walk independently as a outcome of damage to his brain”, they said in a statement.
His attorneys made a flurry of last-minute legal filings, seeking to halt the execution, argued a judge improperly rejected a jury’s recommendation of life imprisonment and Madison is mentally incompetent because of strokes and dementia and doesn’t have a rational understanding of what is about to happen to him.
The US supreme court has ruled, in cases involving inmates with mental illness, that condemned inmates must possess a “rational understanding” that they are about to be executed and why, but left it to lower courts to sort out what that means in individual cases.
The state attorney general’s office told the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday that a lower court decided correctly that Madison is mentally competent and can be executed. The jury recommended a life sentence, but the judge overrode the recommendation and sentenced him to death. The late Justice Antonin Scalia could have been the deciding vote to let the execution proceed.
The U.S. Supreme Court says the execution of an Alabama inmate will not go forward Thursday.
Attorneys with the Equal Justice Initiative filed the request Wednesday at the U.S. District Court Southern District of Alabama in Mobile. The state argues that a county court last month found Madison competent for execution.
Madison’s attorneys from EJI argued that Alabama’s capital sentencing scheme “has exactly the same defect that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional earlier this year in Hurst v. Florida”. They argued that the appellate court read into the state court order legal conclusions that do not exist and that the issue of Madison’s competency had been “clearly and plainly foreclosed”.
“Recent rulings by this court provide a credible basis to believe that Mr. Madison has been sentenced to death in violation of the Constitution”, his petition to the high court stated. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s sentencing method because it gave the final decision to the trial judge instead of a jury.
Alabama has seen a lull in executions of more than two years because of difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs and litigation over the death penalty.
Alabama has said in court filings its law is not identical to Florida’s.
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Christopher Eugene Brooks was executed in January for the 1992 rape and beating death of 23-year-old Jo Deann Campbell.
