04 November 2018 :

Arkansas Supreme Court strikes down mental competency section of state's death penalty. Deciding two different cases, the State Supreme Court struck down a section of its death penalty statute on Thursday, holding that it violated appellants right to due process and equal protection under the US and Arkansas constitutions. A divided Arkansas Supreme Court has struck down the state’s death-penalty mental competency law, holding that statutory provisions giving the state’s prison director exclusive authority to determine a death-row prisoner’s competency to be executed violate due process. The 4-3 rulings on November 1, 2018 were a victory for two mentally ill death-row prisoners, Bruce Ward and Jack Greene, who had come within days of execution in 2017. The appeals court directed the Arkansas trial courts to conduct hearings to determine the men’s mental status and their competency to be executed. Ward, who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was scheduled to be executed on April 17, 2017. A Pulaski County trial court had denied his motion for a hearing to determine his competency to be executed, saying it had no legal authority to rule on the issue. The state supreme court stayed Ward's execution on April 14 (see) to decide whether counsel should be permitted to litigate Ward’s competency to be executed, and on April 17 (see) the US Supreme Court affirmed the stay. Ward was convicted in the 1989 slaying of store clerk Rebecca Doss, 18, and sentenced to death in 1990. Jack Gordon Greene, 63, White, is convicted of the murder of 69-year-old Sidney Jethro Burnett on July 23, 1991. Prior to that, on July 18, he also killed his own brother, Turner “Tommy” Greene, 45, in North Carolina. Greene was sentenced to death in 1992. Greene suffers from psychotic delusions and, according to court pleadings, believes that his attorneys and prison officials are conspiring to torture him. His delusions include that “his spinal cord has been removed and his central nervous system has been destroyed,” in response to which, his lawyers say, Greene “constantly twists his body and stuffs his ear and nose with toilet paper to cope with the pain.” Arkansas had scheduled his execution for November 9, 2017 but the Arkansas Supreme Court granted a stay on November 7 to resolve whether the state's mechanism to determine competency was constitutional. The court’s two rulings determined that Arkansas’s competency law violated the two prisoners’ rights to due process under both the United States and Arkansas constitutions. The statute, Chief Justice John Kemp wrote, failed to “provide for an evidentiary hearing that comports with the fundamental principles of due process,” as set forth in the U.S. Supreme Court’s competency decisions in Ford v. Wainwright and Panetti v. Quarterman. John C. Williams, a federal public defender representing the inmates, told Associated Press that the defense was “pleased the court held the statute unconstitutional, and we look forward to litigating our clients’ competence.”