Death-row inmate's mental disability claim gets SCOTUS review
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the procedure used to decide whether a death-row inmate is ineligible for execution due to mental disability.
The court granted cert on Friday in the case of Kevan Brumfield, convicted in the 1993 fatal shooting of an off-duty police officer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during a robbery attempt, report the Advocate, Courthouse News Service, the New York Times and SCOTUSblog. The officer was killed when he was working a private security job driving a bank manager to make a bank deposit. The SCOTUSblog case page is here and the cert petition is here (PDF).
At issue is whether Brumfield was entitled to a separate evidentiary hearing on his mental disability claim, and whether, as an indigent, he was entitled to state funding to obtain evidence to support the claim. The U.S. Supreme Court banned execution of the mentally disabled in a 2002 decision, Atkins v. Virginia.
A federal judge had granted an Atkins hearing for Brumfield and ruled he was not eligible for execution because of mental disability. The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, finding that Brumfield’s capacity was already determined in state court during the penalty phase of his murder trial, held before Atkins was decided.
The case is Brumfield v. Cain.
