CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) RESOURCE CENTER Read More
Add To Favorites

Man poised to be ex­e­cuted amid mental health fight

Rocky Mount Telegram - 10/30/2017

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Jack Greene’s lawyers said he is severely mentally ill. The Arkansas death row inmate said they are lying.

As Greene approaches a Nov. 9 execution date, his lawyers are raising questions about who should determine his mental competency. Arkansas gives considerable weight to its prison director’s opinion in deciding whether a condemned inmate has the mental capacity to understand his execution; Greene’s lawyers want doctors to have a greater say.

“The system is really quite antiquated,” John Williams, an attorney for Greene, said in an interview. “(Prison director) Wendy Kelley is an arm of the state. She doesn’t have the expertise to make that determination.”

Greene was convicted for the 1991 killing of Sidney Jethro Burnett after Burnett and his wife accused Greene of arson. At least one court this week will take up Greene’s case.

The inmate has not always made it easy for his attorneys. While pleading for clemency, he told the Arkansas Parole Board this month that his lawyers are wrong to call him “delusional” and that courts routinely have found him competent. He also told the board, “I knew what I was doing to him,” when he tortured Burnett for an hour before shooting him. When a doctor testified that Greene has done headstands during examinations and even in courtrooms, Greene told the panel that he does yoga to remain “functional.”

Williams said the seemingly lucid moments mask severe mental illness.

“A lot of people who are mentally ill don’t think they’re mentally ill,” the lawyer said.

The case has drawn the attention of both the American Bar Association and a collection of 28 mental health professionals, who wrote to Gov. Asa Hutchinson saying it would be “morally and ethically wrong” to execute Greene.

“Mr. Greene’s illness manifests itself in extreme physical contortions, in self-mutilation, and in delusional beliefs he holds about a conspiracy against him between his attorneys and prison officials,” the mental health professionals wrote.

Greene stood throughout his Oct. 4 appearance before the Parole Board, fidgeting and fumbling through documents that, he said, promised him a transfer to his home state North Carolina, where authorities said he killed a brother days before killing Burnett. Bloodied, rolled up strands of tissue stuck out of both ears and his left nostril; his lawyers said that is a symptom of Greene’s mental illness.

“If I could go back to North Carolina and get medical treatment, that would be great, but if not, let’s come on with this execution,” he told the panel.

Williams said Greene believes he is being executed because he uncovered a purported (and to Greene, successful) conspiracy among guards and lawyers to torture the inmate and dissolve his central nervous system and spinal column.

“He thinks that the Department of Correction cannot send him back to North Carolina because he knows too much about what has happened to him in prison,” Williams said. “They won’t send him back to North Carolina, so they have to execute him.”

Baloney, state lawyers said. North Carolina sent Greene to Arkansas for his murder trial on the condition that he would be returned if he received any sentence other than the death penalty. Greene knows a transfer is a lifeline, Assistant Attorney General Kathryn Henry said.

The governor said Friday that he still was reviewing Greene’s file after Parole Board members recommended that he not spare the inmate’s life.

Greene’s execution would be Arkansas’ first since it put four men to death in an eight-day period in April.