(Mar. 21, 2016) Adam Ward is scheduled to be executed in Texas Tuesday for the 2005 murder of a code enforcement officer in the city of Commerce (“Texas set to execute man amidst claims of ‘severe mental illness’,” Buzzfeed News, Mar. 21).
Ward – a 33-year-old diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder – fatally shot Michael “Pee Wee” Walker in June 2005 as the officer was documenting code violations because of junk piled inside and outside of Ward’s home. Ward ran out of the house and opened fire on Walker. Walker died after sustaining nine gunshot wounds in total.
According to court documents, Ward confessed to killing Walker soon after the murder, saying he believed “the City” was out to get their family and that the “Illuminati” controlled the majority of the government. He also claimed that he shot Walker because he feared for his life, as Walker had threatened to call the cops.
Ward’s lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court last week, asking the court to stay his execution on the grounds that he is severely mentally ill and should be held to be constitutionally ineligible to be executed.
The appeal argues that Ward's act of murder was “inextricable from the delusions and paranoia fed by his disabling bipolar disorder” and that his mental illness, traced back to his early childhood, is “so severe, so well-documented, and so deeply present” in his life that it made him constitutionally ineligible for the death penalty.
“Adam’s lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder, combined with his isolation and toxic family life, finally culminated in tragedy when he shot and killed City of Commerce Code Enforcement Officer Michael Walker on June 13, 2005,” Ward’s appeal argues.
The state responded that Ward’s claims are without merit and that he had not presented any new evidence.
Ward would become the ninth person to be executed this year, and the fifth to be executed in Texas.
Ward is not the first, and likely not the last person with severe mental illness to commit a violent act that carries the death penalty.
It goes without saying that the lives lost in crimes committed by people in psychiatric crisis are tragedies. Nonetheless, executing mentally ill defendants who acted violently because their treatable brain diseases were not treated takes the criminalization of mental illness to the ultimate inhumane extreme.
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