At some time after 7pm on Monday night, Bruce Ward will be escorted into the death chamber in the Cummins Unit in Arkansas, strapped to a gurney, and have IV lines inserted into his veins. The lines will run through a hole in the wall to a “chemical room” separated from the main chamber by a one-way mirror, and behind that glass two executioners will sit who, when the word is given, will plunge syringes containing three deadly drugs into him.
If the procedure goes according to plan, Ward will sink into a deep sedation caused by the first drug, have his muscles paralysed by the second, and then the third will stop his heart. If it doesn’t, he can look forward to a death that is prolonged, agonizing, and grotesque for those unfortunate enough to witness it.
Either way, Ward, 60, is unlikely to understand what will be happening to him.
From his perspective, he is certain to survive the triple lethal injection and walk out of the prison to fabulous wealth and public acclaim, then go on to found an evangelical ministry that will spread God’s love through the power of his preaching.
Since 1986, under the Ford v Wainwright ruling of the US supreme court, reinforced by Panetti v Quarterman in 2007, states have been banned from executing prisoners who are insane or incapable of understanding the reason they are about to be put to death. Yet Arkansas appears to be hurtling towards just such an outcome in its determined rush to kill Ward, who has consistently displayed signs of mental illness for almost 30 years.
On Wednesday, his lawyers filed a motion to stay his execution, based on his history of mental illness. However, if it goes ahead, it will be one of seven judicial killings (an eighth has been stayed) that the Republican governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson has scheduled over 11 days, a conveyor-belt of death carried out at a pace not seen in the US in more than 50 years. Lawyers for the eight condemned men warn that the crunch of so many executions in such quick succession will run roughshod over constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Of the eight individual cases none is more glaringly at risk of flouting constitutional safeguards than that of Ward, who was first reported to show mental illness as early as 1990 at his initial capital trial for murdering Rebecca Doss, an 18-year-old clerk at the Jackpot Service Station in Little Rock. In 2006, he was evaluated by a court-recognised psychiatrist and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
“At heart here is someone who back in the late 1980s was not competent to stand trial but never had a fair court process to look at whether he was insane. The question was kicked down the road, and here we are now with him facing imminent execution,” said one of his legal team, Joseph Perkovich, an attorney with the Phillips Black project.
When it comes to unlawfully executing prisoners with mental health problems, whether of illness or disability, Arkansas has impressive form. It was the stage of one the most jaw-dropping examples of a politician cutting constitutional corners in order to pander to public opinion – the politician in question in this case being Bill Clinton.
It was January 1992, and Clinton was at the start of a presidential race that would take him all the way to the White House. In the course of the contest, Clinton unusually broke from the campaign trail and hurried back to Arkansas, where he was governor, to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector.
The condemned man had been convicted of a double murder and one of his victims was a police officer. His execution provided Clinton with the perfect chance to establish himself as tough on law and order. The problem though, from a legal perspective, was that after Rector shot his second victim, he turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger: a bullet went through his skull and blew a large part of his frontal lobe out, but Rector didn’t die.
His subsequent mental impairment was not exactly subtle. Famously, he set aside the pecan pie he had ordered for his final meal before being taken to the death chamber, telling the guards that he wanted to save it to eat until after the execution. None of that gave Clinton pause: he went ahead with the lethal injection anyway, before returning to the campaign trial and eventual victory.
In Ward’s case, mental health challenges started young. Teachers at his high school vividly remember him eating flies during class.
Later, after he was put on death row in Arkansas, he was observed to be a loner who lived in almost total isolation. One of his post-conviction lawyers, Joseph Luby, testified in an affidavit that Ward “lacked a rational understanding about his case and was unable to fully and reasonably assist counsel in litigating it”.
Luby noted that Ward was always careful not to come across as insane, but once the attorney had gained his client’s trust the inmate began to reveal his intimate thoughts. He was convinced that he had been framed for the murder of Doss through a vast conspiracy involving the “Illuminati” of Europe, an evil entity who he named Schuller, the Astor family in England and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Ward’s mental health challenges started young. High school teachers vividly remember him eating flies in class
He said he regularly had to wrestle demons inside the prison, as Satan was after him. At one point he believed a dog had entered his body and had lived inside him for many years.
At the same time, he was convinced that he was special. He traced his own lineage back to the Rothschild family, and bragged that his forebears had owned a castle belonging to Victor Hugo.
Among his special powers, he could push cars single-handedly out of snowdrifts and break up fights with ease. He had written a book on marriage and could drive on ice with ordinary summer tires.
William Logan, the psychiatrist who diagnosed his schizophrenia, wrote that when it came to his pending execution, he perceived it as “the product of a conspiracy to harass him so he will accept a life sentence so demonic sources can continue to feed on his soul. He does not believe God will allow the execution to occur.”
In all the years that Ward has displayed such delusional behavior, the department of corrections has provided him with no treatment for any mental health condition. In 2015, the director of the Arkansas department of corrections found “no reasonable grounds” for thinking that Ward lacked understanding of the nature of his punishment or that he was unable to “reach a rational understanding of the reason for his execution”.
In a lawsuit that Ward’s lawyers lodged with state courts last month, it is argued that the lack of treatment was not just a failing in the system, it was actually a conscious policy designed to prevent condemned prisoners attempting to stop executions by appealing to protections established under the US constitution. One former prison officer who worked in the Arkansas death row testified that there was a “no involvement” policy towards death row inmates and mental health services.
“The implied policy that came from the mental health administrators and supervisors was that the agency doesn’t provide psychiatric treatment to death row inmates because of legal concerns. Specifically … about the death row inmate playing crazy to avoid execution.”
Instead of being given medical treatment for his diagnosed schizophrenia, Ward has been held in conditions that are known to cause devastating mental breakdowns. For the past 14 years he has been locked up in Arkansas’ supermax prison in Varner, in conditions of extreme solitary confinement.
He spends all day and night in a cell measuring 12ft by 7.5ft with a solid steel door through which meals are passed via a slot. The cell contains a toilet and shower, so he never has to leave it, and though he is technically allowed out for one hour a day to go to another enclosed cell known as the “exercise yard”, in practice he has for at least a decade declined to do so.
In all that time he has left his cell only two or three times each year. Every other hour of his life, waking and asleep, has been spent inside that solid box in total and unadorned isolation.
This is the individual that the state of Arkansas deems sane enough to go to his death on Monday. Ward himself appears relaxed about the prospect: he is looking forward to walking out of the death chamber a free man.
(TheGuardian US)
