The American legal system prohibits the death penalty for inmates with developmental disabilities, but the laws are less clear-cut for the mentally ill, said law professor John Blume Feb. 24 in Bache Auditorium.

Blume, director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project, spoke as part of the Writer's Bloc series on America's incarceration system. His talk, "The Challenge of Providing Due Process to Mentally Impaired Death Row Inmates," focused on his involvement as appellate counsel for Jamie Wilson, a schizophrenic South Carolina man on death row for shooting and killing two elementary school girls in 1988.

Wilson's sentence was the result of loopholes in legislation concerning mentally ill defendants, Blume said. At the time of his trial, life without parole was not an option in South Carolina. The judge sentenced him to death rather than life with parole.

Wilson, who has suffered from schizophrenia and other disorders since age 14, attempted to enter mental health treatment just weeks before his 1988 crime. However, his father's insurance coverage for him had lapsed, Blume said.

"He was psychotic. He was out of touch with reality," he said. "He was hearing voices that were telling him to go into the school and shoot people."

According to South Carolina law, a person with a mental illness is someone who is unable to conform his or her conduct to the law. Wilson was found guilty but mentally ill, but the judge still imposed the death penalty, Blume said.

Psychologists took Wilson off anti-psychotic medications in 2007, Blume said, because the attorneys were "afraid that, in his current state, a judge would find him competent and allow him to be executed." As a result, Wilson's mental state deteriorated rapidly. Today, he is no longer able to converse or care for himself.

"I'm closer to him than anyone in the world at this point. I see him probably eight times a year," Blume said. "He's not responded to a single question I've asked him in more than two years in [any] intelligible way."

Blume and colleagues had hoped that outgoing South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford would grant clemency, but Sanford did not act on the request.

A hearing is scheduled for June 2011 to determine whether Wilson is competent to be executed. Blume said he hopes the judge will commute the sentence and grant life without parole. The families of the victims "are not opposed to him being granted clemency [and] were not enthusiastic about the prosecution seeking the death sentence to begin with," Blume said.

More broadly, changing legislation to prevent similar cases in the future is challenging, he said, in part due to disagreement about who to classify as mentally ill. But Blume was guardedly optimistic that standards would be established in the near future.

Proving that a person as sick as Wilson is mentally ill is "like trying to prove the sun sets at night," he added. "How do you prove it? Just go out and look."

The Cornell Death Penalty Project sponsors several clinics through which students assist in representing capital defendants, many of whom are mentally impaired. The project also provides information and resources to attorneys representing capital defendants and supports research and scholarship related to the death penalty and its administration.

Olivia Fecteau '11 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.