US appeals court delays execution for Alabama inmate

A federal appeals court on Thursday delayed the execution of an Alabama inmate just hours before he was scheduled to receive a lethal injection  in order to review claims that it would be unconstitutional to execute him because he is no longer competent because of strokes and dementia.

Vernon Madison.

The 11^th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued the stay about seven hours before Vernon Madison, 65, was scheduled to die at 18:00 by lethal injection at a state prison in Atmore.

The appellate court said it will hear oral arguments in Madison's case in June. The Alabama attorney general's office responded with an emergency motion to the US Supreme Court, asking it to let the execution proceed before the death warrant expired at midnight.


Madison was convicted in the 1985 killing of Mobile police Officer Julius Schulte. Schulte had responded to a domestic call involving Madison. Prosecutors said Madison crept up and shot Schulte in the back of the head as he sat in his police car.

Attorneys for the Equal Justice Initiative say that multiple strokes and dementia have left Madison frequently confused and disoriented and unable to understand his pending execution. They said he has an IQ of 72, can no longer walk independently and at one point talked of moving to Florida because he believed he was going to be released from prison.

"Mr Madison suffers from dementia, has no independent recollection of the offense he was convicted of and consequently does not have a rational understanding of why the State of Alabama is attempting to execute him," attorneys with EJI wrote in the stay request.

The US Supreme Court has ruled, in cases involving inmates with mental illness, that condemned inmates must possess a "rational understanding" that they are about to be executed and why, but left it to lower courts to sort out what that looks like in individual cases.