Virginia Democratic governor defies international protests to oversee execution of mentally ill prisoner
By
Kate Randall
8 July 2017
William C. Morva was executed Thursday night in the state of Virginia after Governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, denied his petition for clemency. Morva, 35, a dual Hungarian-American citizen, was sentenced to death for the 2006 murders of a sheriff’s deputy and a hospital security guard.
Morva’s lethal injection proceeded despite international protests highlighting his mental state, which has been described as both a psychosocial disability and a delusional disorder. He was pronounced dead at 9:15 p.m. at the Greensville Correctional Center near Jarratt, Virginia, according to a spokeswoman for the state corrections department. “The execution was carried out without complications,” she said.
This is the third execution presided over by McAuliffe, a longtime Democratic Party operative. While claiming to personally oppose capital punishment due to his Catholic faith, he has vowed to uphold Virginia’s reactionary practice of the death penalty.
The US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Morva in October 2010. On February 21, the high court again declined to hear Morva’s case—his final appeal. The Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to stop the execution of the mentally ill, saying that only people who are “insane” can be spared the death penalty.
However, “the insane” are narrowly defined by the court as those “who are unaware of the punishment they are about to suffer and why they are to suffer it”—a definition excluding most people with severe mental illness. Even by this narrow definition, Morva’s mental condition met the court’s standard of insanity.
Those protesting Morva’s execution included…