Reuters Ohio Man Spared Execution for Second Time in Month LUCASVILLE, Ohio (Reuters) -- For the second time in a month, a
schizophrenic who murdered an Ohio delicatessen owner had his execution
halted minutes before he was to die after a court ordered a delay on
Tuesday.
The Ohio Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, based in Cincinnati, issued a
``verbal stay'' just as Jay Scott was being prepared for death by lethal
injection.
A similar stay issued by another court on April 17 saved his life
minutes before another planned execution. The central issue in his case
has been whether his mental illness allows him to comprehend what is
happening to him.
Scott, 48, has long history of untreated illness including
schizophrenia. Had he been executed, he would have been only the second
person to suffer the death penalty in Ohio since the state reinstated it
in 1981, and the first to die in that time against his will. Wilford
Berry, who voluntarily dropped his appeals, was executed on Feb. 19, 1999.
Scott had earlier on Tuesday consumed a ``final'' meal of fish and a
soft drink at the Southern Ohio Correctional Center in Lucasville, prison
officials said.
Scott was found guilty and sentenced to death for the 1983 slaying of
Cleveland delicatessen owner Vinnie Prince, 74, during a planned robbery
with three other men.
He was subsequently given a second death sentence for killing security
guard Alexander Jones at a restaurant just 13 hours after the first
slaying. That penalty was thrown out by an appeals court because a juror
had read news accounts of Scott's earlier death sentence.
One of 11 children born to alcoholic and abusive parents, Scott never
received treatment for his mental illness, although a brother, also
schizophrenic, has been in and out of institutions.
Scott's attorneys argued that his original lawyers in the delicatessen
murder provided inadequate counsel by failing to raise the issue of his
mental fitness during the sentencing phase that might have spared his
life.
While in prison, Scott has displayed increasingly ``bizarre'' behavior,
including screaming fits and paranoid fantasies, according to a
psychiatrist hired by Scott's lawyers.
Ohio law bars the execution of an inmate who cannot understand his
death sentence or the reason it was applied. But appeals on that basis to
a number of courts failed. Tuesday's delay was invoked so that the entire
bench of the Sixth Circuit could review his last-ditch appeal.
Ohio is not among the 14 states that have forbidden executions of the
mentally retarded, an issue that the U.S. Supreme Court (news
- web
sites) has agreed to address in a North Carolina case.
Scott was less than an hour away from being executed on April 17 but
the Ohio Supreme Court intervened to give a lower court time to consider
the competency issue.
But the lower court and the state supreme court ruled against him and
Republican Gov. Robert Taft refused to grant clemency, declaring that
Scott's mental illness did not prevent him from understanding the legal
proceedings against him.
In declaring he would not grant clemency, Taft said the defense's
decision not to introduce Scott's mental illness as a mitigating
circumstance was a valid legal strategy. Taft said evidence of Scott's
violent criminal history would have countered that argument.
Copyright © 2001. Reuters News Service. All rights reserved. saved from url: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010515/ts/execution_ohio_dc_1.html
May 16, 2001
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