SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
JEFFERSON DUNN, COMMISSIONER, ALABAMA
DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
v. VERNON MADISON
on petition for writ of certiorari to the
united states court of appeals for the eleventh circuit
No. 17–193. Decided November 6, 2017
Per Curiam.
More than 30 years ago, Vernon Madison crept up
behind police officer Julius Schulte and shot him twice in the head
at close range. An Alabama jury found Madison guilty of capital
murder. The trial court sentenced him to death. See
Ex parte Madison, 718 So. 2d 104, 105–106
(1998).
In 2016, as Madison’s execution neared, he
petitioned the trial court for a suspension of his death sentence.
He argued that, due to several recent strokes, he has become
incompetent to be executed. The court held a hearing to receive
testimony from two psychologists who had examined Madison and
prepared reports concerning his competence. The court’s appointed
psychologist, Dr. Karl Kirkland, reported that, although Madison
may have “suffered a significant decline post-stroke,
. . . [he] understands the exact posture of his case at
this point,” and appears to have a “rational understanding of
. . . the results or effects” of his death sentence. App.
to Pet. for Cert. 75a (internal quotation marks omitted);
Madison v.
Commissioner, Ala. Dept. of Corrections,
851 F. 3d 1173, 1193 (CA11 2017) (internal quotation marks
omitted). Asked at the hearing whether Madison understands that
Alabama is seeking retribution against him for his criminal act,
Dr. Kirkland answered, “Certainly.”
Id., at 1180 (internal
quotation marks omitted).
Dr. John Goff, a psychologist hired by Madison’s
counsel, reported that Madison’s strokes have rendered him unable
to remember “numerous events that have occurred over the past
thirty years or more.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 77a. Nevertheless,
Dr. Goff found that Madison “is able to understand the nature of
the pending proceeding and he has an understanding of what he was
tried for”; that he knows he is “in prison . . . because
of ‘murder’ ”; that he “understands that . . .
[Alabama is] seeking retribution” for that crime; and that he
“understands the sentence, specifically the meaning of a death
sentence.”
Id., at 76a–78a (some internal quotation marks
omitted). In Dr. Goff’s opinion, however, Madison does not
“understan[d] the act that . . . he is being punished
for” because he cannot recall “the sequence of events from the
offense to his arrest to the trial or any of those details” and
believes that he “never went around killing folks.”
Ibid.
(internal quotation marks omitted).
The trial court denied Madison’s petition. It
held that, under this Court’s decisions in
Ford v.
Wainwright, 477 U. S. 399 (1986) , and
Panetti
v.
Quarterman, 551 U. S. 930 (2007) , Madison was
entitled to relief if he could show that he “suffers from a mental
illness which deprives [him] of the mental capacity to rationally
understand that he is being executed as a punishment for a crime.”
App. to Pet. for Cert. 74a. The court concluded that Madison had
failed to make that showing. Specifically, it found that Madison
understands “that he is going to be executed because of the murder
he committed[,] . . . that the State is seeking
retribution[,] and that he will die when he is executed.”
Id., at 82a.
Madison then filed a petition for a writ of
habeas corpus in Federal District Court. As a state prisoner,
Madison is entitled to federal habeas relief under the
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) only
if the state trial court’s adjudication of his incompetence claim
“was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of,
clearly established Federal law, as determined by” this Court, or
else was “based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in
light of the evidence presented” in state court. 28
U. S. C. § 2254(d). A habeas petitioner meets this
demanding standard only when he shows that the state court’s
decision was “so lacking in justification that there was an error
well understood and comprehended in existing law beyond any
possibility for fairminded disagreement.”
Harrington v.
Richter, 562 U. S. 86, 103 (2011) . The District Court
denied Madison’s petition after concluding that the state court
“correctly applied
Ford and
Panetti” and did not make
an “unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the
evidence.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 67a.
The Eleventh Circuit granted a certificate of
appealability and, on appeal, reversed over Judge Jordan’s dissent.
In the majority’s view, given the undisputed fact that Madison “has
no memory of his capital offense,” it inescapably follows that he
“does not rationally understand the connection between his crime
and his execution.” 851 F. 3d, at 1185–1186. On that basis,
the Eleventh Circuit held that the trial court’s conclusion that
Madison is competent to be executed was “plainly unreasonable” and
“cannot be reconciled with any reasonable application of
Panetti.”
Id., at 1187–1188 (internal quotation marks
omitted).
We disagree. In
Panetti, this Court
addressed the question whether the Eighth Amendment forbids the
execution of a prisoner who lacks “the mental capacity to
understand that [he] is being executed as a punishment for a
crime.” 551 U. S., at 954 (internal quotation marks omitted).
We noted that the retributive purpose of capital punishment is not
well served where “the prisoner’s mental state is so distorted by a
mental illness that his awareness of the crime and punishment has
little or no relation to the understanding of those concepts shared
by the community as a whole.”
Id., at 958–959. Similarly, in
Ford, we questioned the “retributive value of executing a
person who has no comprehension of why he has been singled out.”
477 U. S., at 409. Neither
Panetti nor
Ford
“clearly established” that a prisoner is incompetent to be executed
because of a failure to remember his commission of the crime, as
distinct from a failure to rationally comprehend the concepts of
crime and punishment as applied in his case. The state court did
not unreasonably apply
Panetti and
Ford when it
determined that Madison is competent to be executed
because—notwithstanding his memory loss—he recognizes that he will
be put to death as punishment for the murder he was found to have
committed.
Nor was the state court’s decision founded on an
unreasonable assessment of the evidence before it. Testimony from
each of the psychologists who examined Madison supported the
court’s finding that Madison understands both that he was tried and
imprisoned for murder and that Alabama will put him to death as
punishment for that crime.
In short, the state court’s determinations of
law and fact were not “so lacking in justification” as to give rise
to error “beyond any possibility for fairminded disagreement.”
Richter,
supra, at 103. Under that deferential
standard, Madison’s claim to federal habeas relief must fail. We
express no view on the merits of the underlying question outside of
the AEDPA context.
The petition for a writ of certiorari and
respondent’s motion to proceed
in forma pauperis are
granted, and the judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed.
It is so ordered.