NYTimes: Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration

NYTimes: Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration

"Eventually his case attracted lawyers who managed to place before the United States Supreme Court the question of whether it is constitutional to put to death a defendant who has erased much of his brain.

The high court, however, refused to hear Rector's case, declining to explain or expand upon its decision in Ford v. Wainwright (1986) 477 U.S. 399, in which it had determined that it was unconstitutional to execute a defendant who is insane. Rector's lawyers had urged the Court to likewise hold that it is unconstitutional to execute a defendant who is incompetent.

But in Rector v. Bryant (1991) 501 U.S. 1239, the United States Supreme Court denied cert, meaning that it declined to hear the case, because five justices were not willing to consider it. As occurs in only a decided minority of such rejected-cert cases, one justice, Thurgood Marshall, filed a dissent to the denial of cert. In that dissent, Justice Marshall wrote:

The issue in this case is not only unsettled, but is also recurring and important. The stark realities are that many death row inmates were afflicted with serious mental impairments before they committed their crimes and that many more develop such impairments during the excruciating interval between sentencing and execution. Unavoidably, then, the question whether such persons can be put to death once the deterioration of their faculties has rendered them unable even to appeal to the law or the compassion of the society that has condemned them is central to the administration of the death penalty in this Nation. I would therefore grant the petition for certiorari in order to resolve now the questions left unanswered by our decision in Ford v. Wainwright."