Schizophrenic Inmate Executed in Ohio.

Ignoring local and international protests, Ohio executed a man in June who, according to his lawyers, was a schizophrenic too mentally ill to understand what was happening to him, according to a June 15 Reuters report.

Convicted of murdering an elderly Cleveland man in 1983, the inmate was executed by lethal injection June 14 at a state prison at Lucasville. He had exhausted all appeals after the U.S. Supreme Court and Ohio Gov. Bob Taft refused to prevent his execution.

This was the third time in less than two months the inmate had faced execution. On April 17, and again on May 15, courts ordered a halt just minutes before he was to die. In the latter instance, prison officials already had placed tubes in his arms to prepare him for the injection when the process was stopped.

The inmate's lawyers said he had a long history of untreated mental illness, including schizophrenia, that made him incompetent and unable to understand why he was to be executed. However, courts at several levels had rejected that argument, ruling that the inmate was mentally competent to face his sentence. According to a psychiatrist hired by the inmate's lawyers, while in prison, the inmate displayed increasingly "bizarre" behavior, including screaming fits and paranoid fantasies.

This execution was the first carried out against an inmate's will in the state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1981. Ohio only had carried out one other execution since its reinstatement, which was Feb. 19, 1999.