Some of the inmates sentenced to death in South Carolina can’t be sent to the state’s death chamber, pictured above. (Provided by the SC Department of Corrections)
COLUMBIA — Five condemned South Carolina inmates are ineligible to face execution despite their decades on death row.
Of the 29 inmates sentenced to death, two have been found legally incompetent for execution — including an inmate who killed a man in jail while awaiting trial — and another two have their sentences on hold while a lower court decides whether their death sentences can be carried out.
A fifth inmate claims he has brain damage and is intellectually disabled. That’s a different legal argument than incompetency but similarly halts his execution as he awaits a judge’s decision, according to the state Attorney General’s Office.
Until an inmate regains competence, or a judge decides his mental state does not affect his understanding of his punishment, he can’t face the death chamber.
A sixth inmate, Steven Bixby, has newly claimed incompetence. He is expected to be executed May 16, the last of six on the schedule set by the state Supreme Court after executions resumed in September following an unintended 13-year hiatus.
His attorneys are still awaiting a response from justices as to whether they’ll put his execution on hold at least long enough to hear them out.
Attorneys say inmate who killed 2 officers in 2003 shootout can’t be legally executed
The state’s next execution is scheduled for March 7 by firing squad.
A person found to have a mental illness is legally entitled to a hearing deciding whether they understand their crime and punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1986. However, it’s up to each state to determine what exactly that means, said Robert Maher, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.
South Carolina’s competency test has two prongs.
In order to be executed, an inmate must understand why they are being punished and the consequence for the crime. For instance, if an inmate does not understand that they’re going to die, or if they don’t understand what they did, they can’t be put to death, the court ruled.
The inmate must also be able to “rationally communicate” with their attorneys to help in their defense, the state Supreme Court has decided.
Those requirements are different from what it takes for someone to be declared not guilty by way of insanity. To make that plea during a trial, a person has to claim that they did not understand “the nature and quality of the act” or that what they did was wrong.
All four inmates whose death warrants are suspended for competency reasons were found legally sane to stand trial but later lost their understanding of their crime or their punishment, according to court documents.
Because of the possibility that an inmate’s mental state might change, their execution must be imminent before they can claim incompetence, the state Supreme Court has ruled.
These are the men, ages 55 to 80, who have either been found incompetent for execution or are waiting on a judge to decide if they will face the death chamber. Their crimes span from 1982 to 2003.
Fred Singleton
In September 1982, Fred Singleton raped and strangled 73-year-old widow Elizabeth Lominick in Newberry County. He was arrested in Georgetown County with her car, her diamond and gold jewelry, and about $100 of her money. He was sentenced to death for the crime the next year.
In 1992, about a decade later, Singleton’s attorneys argued to the state’s highest court that he shouldn’t be executed. Singleton did not understand that he could die in the electric chair — the default execution method at the time — and he was unable to respond to his attorneys’ questions with anything other than “yes” or “no,” making it difficult for his lawyers to communicate with him, his appeals lawyers argued.
Up until that point, the state Supreme Court had not considered what it meant for a person to be competent for execution. In looking at Singleton’s case, justices decided on the two-prong test that they would continue to use in determining an inmate’s competence.
Based on that test, Singleton was “incapable of meeting even a modicum of competency,” then-Justice Jean Toal wrote in the court’s 1993 opinion. While it was possible medication could make him competent for execution, as the state’s attorneys argued, officials couldn’t force him to take the medication just to be executed, the court decided.
The court also decided that a judge couldn’t reverse Singleton’s sentence because justices couldn’t assume his condition was permanent, according to the opinion.
“To carve out a remedy which ignores the ebb and flow of medical science is to create a rule which potentially could be impossible to live with in years to come,” Toal wrote.
That has not happened in the four decades Singleton has spent on death row.
At 80 years old, Singleton is the longest-serving and oldest inmate on death row, where he will likely die, unless his mental state changes.
Mar-reece Hughes
Doctors went back and forth as to whether Mar-reece Hughes was fit to stand trial for killing York County Sheriff’s Deputy Brent McCants in 1992, according to court documents.
A doctor found him competent, then declared him incompetent several months later. As long as he was taking his prescribed medication, which is allowed to be forcibly administered during a trial, Hughes was found to be capable of standing trial, according to court documents.
Hughes and another man, both armed, stole a car from two college students in Charlotte before driving to Rock Hill, where McCants stopped them for driving without headlights. One of the men — each said it was the other — then shot McCants to death, according to court documents.
While he was awaiting trial on that murder charge, Hughes attacked two fellow inmates at the York County jail with a knife, killing one and wounding the other, according to court records.
Hughes was sent to the prison system’s psychiatric hospital, where doctors reported he was speaking “with occasional, seemingly rational comments dominated by unintelligible, wildly divergent, and irrelevant dialogue peppered with made-up words and references to nonexistent places,” the state Supreme Court wrote in its opinion.
Based on those observations, doctors decided Hughes had been having a psychotic episode and was legally insane during that killing, exempting him from trial for it.
However, he was convicted and sentenced to death in 1995 for killing McCants.
Several years later, he told the attorney general to waive his remaining appeals, clearing the way for his execution. He changed his mind, then continued to flip-flop several times over the coming years, according to court documents.
After Hughes requested to waive his appeals, the state Supreme Court twice asked lower court judges to decide whether Hughes was mentally able to put himself up for execution without exhausting the lengthy legal process that usually comes first.
Two judges, two years apart, decided Hughes was competent. But in a 2006 ruling, the state Supreme Court disagreed.
While housed in a psychiatric hospital, Hughes stopped eating or bathing, refused to take his medications, tore up his jumpsuits and was unable to take care of himself, hospital staff told the court.
He told hospital staff about delusions, including that the state wanted to put him to death because he was once able to run 300 miles a week and that his days had between 36 and 38 hours in them, unlike what he saw as 12 hours in other peoples’ days, according to the state Supreme Court’s ruling.
“He needs medication, but to get him well enough to even know what he would want when he’s well, what kinds of medication he would need to be maintained on, we’ve never gotten to that point,” one doctor testified, according to the decision.
Because of that, Hughes was not competent to waive his legal process, the court said in a 3-2 ruling.
Like Singleton, Hughes, now 59, remains incompetent, according to status updates his attorneys continue to give the court.
Jamie Wilson
When Jamie Wilson entered a Greenwood elementary school in 1988 and began shooting, he was aware that his actions were wrong, but auditory hallucinations caused by his misdiagnosed schizophrenia made him unable to stop himself, his attorneys have argued.
Wilson, then 19, killed two 8-year-old girls and injured several other teachers and students that day.
During his 1989 trial, Wilson pleaded guilty but mentally ill, a plea that acknowledges a person’s mental illness while still allowing the court to sentence them like anyone else.
A judge accepted Wilson’s plea, acknowledging that he was unable to follow the law. The judge then sentenced Wilson to death.
Wilson’s attorneys challenged his sentence, arguing that a person who is guilty but mentally ill is necessarily incompetent for execution.
Wilson experienced hallucinations that compelled him to commit the crime, his attorneys said. He had spent time in psychiatric hospitals, and he had recently been turned away because he no longer had insurance. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, Wilson obsessed over stories of true crime, including a murder that happened next door, according to court records.
“The most common reaction to Jamie’s story, regardless of the death penalty views of the audience, is ‘What?’” his attorney, John Blume, wrote in a paper about incompetence standards. “At the very least, it is counterintuitive to kill someone for behavior he was powerless to avoid.”
But the state Supreme Court decided otherwise, writing that even people who are mentally ill need to face consequences.
“The difficulty lies in the fact that reasonable people normally do not commit crimes, much less heinous crimes of the kind committed here,” then-Justice Toal wrote in 1992. “Hence, criminals like Jamie Wilson are, of necessity, unreasonable in their actions. They, of necessity, have an abnormal desire or compulsion to take these criminal actions. This does not mean that they should not be punished.”
Still, justices granted Wilson a competency hearing in 2004. A judge heard his case in 2011 but in the 14 years since has not issued a ruling on whether the 55-year-old is competent for execution, his attorneys confirmed.
Until a judge makes a decision, the state Supreme Court can’t issue a death warrant for Wilson.
John Richard Wood
John Richard Wood was sentenced to death for killing state Highway Patrol Trooper Eric Nicholson in 2000. Nicholson tried to stop Wood, who was driving a moped on Interstate 85, when Wood shot Nicholson five times, killing him.
Wood was diagnosed with schizophrenia during a stint at the state prison system’s psychiatric hospital. Over the course of three involuntary stays there, Wood talked about delusions involving himself and his case, his attorneys wrote.
Wood ate less because he believed he was being poisoned. He claimed he was a U.S. Army Ranger and a 300-year-old immortal who is immune to poison. He repeatedly told staff that his sentence had been overturned and he would soon be released from prison, according to staff notes his attorneys included in their petition.
Between June 2013 and January 2016, during which time a psychologist evaluated him several times, his mental state significantly deteriorated, his attorneys wrote.
During evaluations and court appearances, Wood rambled in a way the psychologist described as “word salad.” He was unable to answer questions or talk about his case in any way that made sense. The last time the psychologist saw him in 2016, “he was thin, malodorous, agitated, loud, and completely disorganized,” she wrote.
Attorneys for the state called those evaluations “stale information” because they took place years before his 2022 petition claiming incompetence. They also contended that Wood’s attorneys did not give enough information on the results of his mental illness to prove him incompetent.
The state Supreme Court granted his request for the appeal in 2022. The 57-year-old has not yet had a hearing in the case, according to the most recent update filed by his attorneys.
Gary Terry
Gary Terry’s case differs in that he is claiming he is intellectually disabled instead of incompetent for execution. While the other inmates’ arguments hinge on mental illness, his is based on alleged brain damage, according to court documents.
Gary Terry was convicted in 1997 of raping and killing 47-year-old Urai Jackson in her West Columbia house. Terry, 29 at the time, went to Jackson’s house across the street from his own, destroyed the phone box outside, broke in through the back door and killed Jackson by hitting her in the head with a wooden board. Terry then had sex with her corpse, a jury determined.
Terry, who had a wife and four children at the time, claimed he and Jackson had consensual sex. Jackson was upset when Terry tried to leave, causing him to lose his temper and hit her with an object he couldn’t remember, he said.
Testing before Terry’s trial determined his intellectual functioning to be in the “low average range,” but not low enough to qualify him as intellectually disabled, attorneys for the state argued in court documents.
However, that testing did not include a full, proper evaluation, Terry’s attorneys claimed. Terry was sentenced to death in 1997, five years before the U.S. Supreme Court would decide that people with intellectual disabilities can’t be executed, meaning his case has not been considered in that light, the 2022 petition continued.
In that 2002 decision, the nation’s highest court decided a person was considered intellectually disabled if they had “diminished capacities to understand and process information, to communicate, to abstract from mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, to control impulses, and to understand others’ reactions,” according to the 6-3 opinion.
Ahead of Terry’s trial, brain scans found that he had at some point experienced a small stroke, causing brain tissue to die near the base of his brain. That involved parts of the brain that control focus and the ability to control behavior, according to court documents.
His attorneys pointed to a history of intellectual problems. Terry tested far below average intelligence and showed an inability to learn basic skills or adjust to changing situations, his attorneys claimed. Elementary teachers noted that he struggled in all subject areas and had difficulty functioning in class.
When Terry was 11, he was placed in a special education class but continued to fall behind until he eventually dropped out of school, according to court documents. That was because of an intellectual disability, his attorneys claimed.
Terry, who is now 57, had a hearing in Lexington County in July. He is waiting on the judge’s decision. If he is found to be intellectually disabled, his case could be sent back to court for a new sentence, as per the U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting people with intellectual disabilities from receiving the death penalty.
Steven Bixby
Bixby could become the next inmate unable to receive a death warrant.
His attorneys argued in November that he had developed “belief in bizarre and paranoid concepts,” including that officials had injected him with a tracking device, that blood found on his clothing contained the DNA of Christ and that crime scene photos showed an angel was present that day, according to court documents.
Bixby was convicted in 2007 of killing two police officers four years earlier during a daylong standoff on his family’s Abbeville property. Bixby and his parents were angered by a plan by state transportation officials to expand a highway over a piece of the property using an easement.
He and his father stationed themselves at the house’s windows and shot at anyone who approached.
Although his beliefs about the U.S. Constitution and government authority were unusual, they did not veer into mental illness, previous evaluations found. Attorneys for the state pointed to those findings in response to the claims that Bixby is now incompetent, arguing that his beliefs have not changed.
More recent evaluations determined Bixby was unable to understand the facts of his case or the legal system, making him unhelpful to his attorneys, a psychiatrist said in his attorneys’ petition submitted in November.
Attorneys for the state have requested the state Supreme Court order a mental evaluation by the state Department of Corrections, which Bixby’s attorneys have opposed with the argument that this could create a conflict of interest. The high court has not made a decision on that or whether to halt the 57-year-old’s execution to hear his attorneys’ claims.