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OF MICE AND MEN (and Cecil Clayton): Death Penalty On Trial in Missouri

OF MICE AND MEN (and Cecil Clayton): Death Penalty On Trial in Missouri

Last updated on: March 19, 2015 at 2:28 pm by Kathy Schiffer

OF MICE AND MEN (and Cecil Clayton): Death Penalty On Trial in Missouri 2015-03-19T14:28:01-05:00 Kathy Schiffer

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There were crashing footsteps in the brush now, George turned and looked toward them.

“Go on, George. When we gonna do it?”

“Gonna do it soon.”

“Me an’ you.”

“You … an’ me. Ever’body gonna be nice to you. Ain’t gonna be no more trouble. Nobody gonna hurt nobody nor steal from ’em.”

Lennie said, “I thought you was mad at me, George.”

“No,” said George. “No, Lennie, I ain’t mad. I never been mad, an’ I ain’t now. That’s a thing I want ya to know.”

The voices came close now. George raised the gun and listened to the voices.

Lennie begged, “Let’s do it now. Let’s get that place now.”

“Sure, right now. I gotta. We gotta.”

And George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the muzzle of it close to the back of Lennie’s head. The hand shook violently, but his face set and his hand steadied. He pulled the trigger. The crash of the shot rolled up the hills and rolled down again. Lennie jarred, and then settled slowly forward to the sand, and he lay without quivering.

George shivered and looked at the gun, and then he threw it from him, back up on the bank, near the pile of old ashes.

–John Steinbeck, “Of Mice and Men”

Do you remember that scene, either from the Steinbeck novel or from the 1939 film, when George, a migrant worker, kills his mentally incompetent friend Lennie, rather than let him face an angry mob? You knew–oh! how you knew!–that it was wrong, that the unfortunate death of that pretty woman wasn’t Lennie’s fault. Lennie loved stroking soft things but often accidentally killed them; he was just too strong, too feeble-minded, to understand what he had done.

* * * * *

On Tuesday, March 17, the state of Missouri executed an elderly man with a critical brain injury, severe mental illness and dementia.

The case of Cecil Clayton spotlights the abject horror of capital punishment. Earlier this month, four major Catholic news sources came together to release an unprecedented joint statement opposing capital punishment in all cases. As the Supreme Court prepared to hear arguments in Glossip v. Gross, a case out of Oklahoma that challenges the most widely used lethal injection protocol as being cruel and unusual punishment, the National Catholic Register, the National Catholic Reporter, Our Sunday Visitor and America magazine urge the readers of their diverse publications and the whole U.S. Catholic community and all people of faith to stand with them and say, “Capital punishment must end.”

Whether the prisoner is seriously impaired (as in the case of Cecil Clayton, executed this week in Missouri), or innocent (as Lionel Herrera, executed in 1993 in Texas), or totally, inescapably guilty, the death penalty is a horrendous solution.

For the condemned, the death penalty short-circuits the process of remorse and spiritual conversion–thus, possibly denying him an eternity in heaven.

For society, capital punishment is extremely expensive. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a study in the state of Kansas concluded that capital cases are 70% more expensive than comparable non-death penalty cases. The study counted death penalty case costs through to execution and found that the median death penalty case costs $1.26 million.

But worse than the cost of the lengthy appeals and challenges, the death penalty makes killers of us all.

* * * * *

The case of 74-year-old Cecil Clayton, who was executed by lethal injection this week, is particularly troublesome–both because one can’t help but sympathize with the executed prisoner, but also because the sentence was, in the estimation of many, unconstitutional.

Clayton was a good family man with no history of criminal activity when, in 1972, he was injured in an accident while working at a sawmill. A splinter from a log he was cutting broke off and careened toward him, striking his head and embedding itself and a large section of his skull deep in his frontal lobe. After the accident, Clayton underwent surgery that removed a large portion of his brain–about a fifth of the frontal lobe, which plays an important role in controlling impulse and emotion. The damage resulted in dramatic changes in Clayton’s character and behavior: Medical experts chronicled problems ranging from uncontrolled rage to hallucinations and depression.

So in 1996, Clayton murdered a police officer. The officer, Christopher Castetter, was responding to a call after Clayton had broken into a home. He was, most certainly, guilty of the crime. But was he criminally culpable? Why did the jury not find him not guilty by reason of insanity?

The execution was briefly delayed while the Supreme Court considered the final appeal. Clayton’s attorneys had petitioned the Court, arguing that it would be unconstitutional to execute the prisoner because under a series of rulings in recent years, the Supreme Court has banned judicial killings of insane and intellectually disabled people. According to The Guardian, in 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that it is unconstitutional to put to death an intellectually disabled person (previously known as mental retardation) under the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. And last year, that protection was strengthened in Hall v. Florida, which obligated states to consider several indicators of intellectual disability, not just an IQ cut-off score.

But in the end, Clayton’s life was snuffed out, as was that of the officer he killed that night in 1996.

Elizabeth Unger Carlyle, attorney for Clayton, released a statement:

Cecil Clayton had – literally – a hole in his head. Executing him without a hearing to determine his competency violated the constitution, Missouri law and basic human dignity.

Mr Clayton was not a ‘criminal’ before the sawmill accident that lodged part of his skull into his brain and required 20% of his frontal lobe to be removed. He was happily married, raising a family and working hard at his logging business.

Medical experts who examined 74-year-old Mr. Clayton said he couldn’t care for himself, tried but couldn’t follow simple instructions, and was intellectually disabled with an IQ of 71. He suffered from severe mental illness and dementia related to his age and multiple brain injuries. The world will not be a safer place because Mr Clayton has been executed.

* * * * *

The Clayton case has drawn little fire to date in the mainstream media–but it seems outrageous to me. Even when there is no question about the perpetrator’s culpability, it is contrary to the mercy that we are obliged to practice. In a case like this, when the individual’s mental capacity is severely impacted by trauma, capital punishment is a very grave offense against justice.

Missouri’s liberal Democratic governor Jay Nixon could have blocked it. The U.S. Supreme Court could have blocked it. But instead, state-sanctioned murder was committed, under the guise of “justice.”

What a sad revelation of the “culture of death” in which we live.

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