Arkansas can execute mentally ill inmates, as long as medication enables them to understand that they are being executed and the reason for it, a US federal appeals court has ruled.
The decision reopens a longstanding debate about whether mentally ill inmates can be executed if they are sane only while taking drugs.
In 1986 the Supreme Court proclaimed it illegal to execute people unless they understood that they were being put to death and why. But when that understanding is medically induced, as in the case of Charles Laverne Singleton (pictured above), Arkansas's longest serving inmate on death row, the question of what constitutes true sanity becomes more complicated.
On 11 February the Eighth US Circuit Court of Appeals in St Louis reversed a 2-1 decision handed down on 12 October 2001 by one of its own three panels of judges. The court thus cleared the way for execution of mentally ill inmates if they can be successfully medicated. The panel of judges had previously granted a permanent stay of execution to Singleton, now 43, who has paranoid schizophrenia and who has been on Arkansas's death row since 1979 for stabbing to death Mary Lou York, a grocer from Hamburg, Arkansas.
The appellate panel ordered that Singleton's death sentence be reduced to life in prison without parole. But the state of Arkansas appealed, leading to a rehearing by the full court.
AP PHOTO/MIKE WINTROATH