Kansan Wesley Ira Purkey’s crimes were terrible, and his execution was, too

Attorney General Bill Barr is apparently just as eager to ignore the U.S. Constitution in a law-and-order election year as Bill Clinton was decades ago — by executing a man whose understanding was so limited that he often didn’t remember why he was being put to death.

In this case, that was 68-year-old Wesley Ira Purkey, of Wichita, who received a lethal injection in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Thursday morning after the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to lift several injunctions. He was executed for the rape and murder of 16-year-old Jennifer Long in Kansas City in 1998, and was found guilty in Wyandotte County of killing 80-year-old Mary Ruth Bales with a hammer that same year.

Barr argues that victims require retribution. But in its landmark 1986 Ford v. Wainwright decision, the Supreme Court ruled that it’s unconstitutional to execute someone who doesn’t understand why he is being put to death by the state. It was well documented that Purkey suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, schizophrenia and brain damage. Yet he did not even get a hearing on his competence.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “proceeding with Purkey’s execution now, despite the grave questions and factual findings regarding his mental competency, casts a shroud of constitutional doubt over the most irrevocable of injuries.”

Purkey’s crimes were terrible, and so, for that matter, was his whole traumatic history, which included sexual abuse by his mother from the time he was 10. He was also allegedly sexually abused for years by a priest at the Catholic school he attended in Wichita, and suffered a brain injury at 16. But there’s a lot of medical evidence that his mental condition had deteriorated drastically in the 16 years since he was sentenced to death. In his final statement, he apologized to Long’s family and his own daughter, then said something incomprehensible about sanitized state killings.

In his majority opinion against executing the insane, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote that “such an execution has questionable retributive value, presents no example to others and thus has no deterrence value, and simply offends humanity.”

Other than that, no problem. In his concurring opinion, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. defined insanity quite narrowly, writing that the Eighth Amendment “forbids the execution only of those who are unaware of the punishment they are about to suffer and why they are to suffer it.”

In that case, Alvin Bernard Ford’s mental condition had likewise deteriorated in the years after his Florida murder conviction, to the point that he had become convinced that the KKK was trying to get him to commit suicide, and that his female relatives and Sen. Ted Kennedy were all being held and tortured elsewhere in the prison. He started referring to himself as Pope John Paul III, and believed that in the end he would not be put to death because he secretly owned the prison.

Six years after the Ford ruling, that precedent didn’t keep then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton from refusing to stop the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a Black man from Conway, Arkansas, who had been cognitively impaired all his life. He shot and killed two people, including a police officer who was a friend of his family, then shot himself in the head. He survived his suicide attempt, but effectively gave himself a lobotomy.

After that, he was like a child, according to even prison officials, and was so lacking in understanding that he put aside the pecan pie in his last meal for later, because he didn’t grasp that there wouldn’t be any later. The night before he was put to death, he saw Clinton on television and remarked that he intended to vote for him in November.

Clinton, like Barr’s boss, President Donald Trump, was eager to look tough on crime that year, 1992. It worked, too; Clinton was “a different kind of Democrat,” everyone said.

He was nonetheless wrong, though. And what was wrong in 1992 was still wrong today.

This story was originally published July 15, 2020 at 8:25 PM.