1 Cite as: 583 U. S. ____ (2017)

Per Curiam



## 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

P ER C URIAM

. More than 30 years ago, Vernon Madison crept up be

hind 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 re cent strokes, he has become incompetent to be executed. The court held a hearing to receive testimony from two psychologists who had exam

ined Madison and prepared re ports concerning his compe

tence. The court’s appointed psychologist, Dr. Karl Kirk

land, 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 ef

fects” of his death sentence. App. to Pet. for Cert. 75a (internal quotation marks omitted); Madison v. Commis

sioner, 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 coun

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Per Curiam

sel, 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 deta ils” and believes that he “never went around killing folks.” Ibid. (internal quota

tion 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 appli

-3 Cite as: 583 U. S. ____ (2017)

Per Curiam

cation 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 deni ed Madison’s petition after concluding that the state court “correctly applied Ford and
Panetti ” and did not make an “unreasonable determina

tion 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 Madi

son “has no memory of his capital offense,” it inescapably follows that he “does not rationally understand the con

nection 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 ques

tion 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 ques

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Per Curiam

tioned 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 estab

lished” 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 pun

ishment for the murder he was found to have committed.
Nor was the state court’s decision founded on an unrea

sonable 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 justificat ion” 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.1 Cite as: 583 U. S. ____ (2017)

G INSBURG

, J., concurring



## 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

J USTICE G INSBURG , with whom J USTICE B REYER and
J USTICE S OTOMAYOR join, concurring.
The issue whether a State may administer the death penalty to a person whose disability leaves him without memory of his commission of a capital offense is a sub

stantial question not yet addressed by the Court. Appro

priately presented, the issue would warrant full airing. But in this case, the restrain ts imposed by the Antiterror

ism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, I agree, preclude consideration of the question. With that under

standing, I join the Court’s per curiam disposition of this

case.1 Cite as: 583 U. S. ____ (2017)

B REYER
, J., concurring



## 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

J USTICE B REYER

, concurring.
I join the Court’s per curiam disposition of this case for
the reason set forth in J USTICE G INSBURG ’s concurrence (which I also join). I write separately to underline the fact that this case illustrates one of the basic problems with the administration of the death penalty itself. That prob

lem concerns the unconscionably long periods of time that prisoners often spend on death row awaiting execution.
See Glossip v. Gross , 576 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2015) (B REYER , J., dissenting) (slip op., at 2, 17–33). As I have previously noted, this Court once said that delays in execution can produce uncertainty amounting to

“ ‘one of the most horrible feelings to which’ ” a prisoner

“ ‘can be subjected.’ ” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 20) (quoting In re Medley , 134 U. S. 160, 172 (1890)). Justice Stevens later observed that the delay in Medley was a delay of four
weeks

. Lackey v. Texas

, 514 U. S. 1045, 1046 (1995) (memorandum respecting denial of certiorari). And he
wrote that the Medley description “should apply with even greater force in the case of delays that last for many years.” 514 U. S., at 1046. In light of those statements, consider the present case. The respondent, Vernon Madison, was convicted of a murder that took place in April 1985. He was sentenced
to death and transferred to Alabama’s William C. Holman Correctional Facility in September 1985. Mr. Madison is now 67 years old. He has lived nearly half of his life on2 DUNN v. MADISON

B REYER
, J., concurring

death row. During that ti me, he has suffered severe strokes, which caused vascular dementia and numerous other significant physical and mental problems. He is legally blind. His speech is slurred. He cannot walk independently. He is incontinent. His disability leaves him without a memory of his commission of a capital
offense. Moreover, Mr. Madison is one among a growing number of aging prisoners who remain on death row in this coun

try for ever longer periods of time. In 1987, the average period of imprisonment between death sentence and exe

cution was just over seven years. See Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, T. Snell, Capital Punishment, 2013—Statistical Tables 14 (rev. Dec. 19, 2014) (Table 10). A decade later, in 1997, the average delay was about 11

years. Ibid. In 2007, the average delay rose to a little less than 13 years. Ibid. In 2017, the 21 individuals who have
been executed were on death row on average for more than 19 years. See Death Penalty Information Center, Execu

tion List 2017, online at https://deathpenaltyinfo.org /
execution-list-2017 (as last visited Nov. 3, 2017). Alabama
has executed three individuals this year, including Thomas Arthur, who spent 34 years on death row before hisexecution on May 26, 2017, at the age of 75; Robert Melson, who spent 21 years on death row before his execution on June 8, 2017; and Torrey McNabb, who spent nearly
two decades on death row before his execution on October 19, 2017. Given this trend, we may face ever more instances of state efforts to execute prisoners suffering the diseases and infirmities of old age. And we may well have to con

sider the ways in which lengthy periods of imprisonment between death sentence and execution can deepen the cruelty of the death penalty while at the same time un

dermining its penological rationale. Glossip

, supra, at ___–___ (B REYER , J., dissenting) (slip op., at 17–18) (rec

-3 Cite as: 583 U. S. ____ (2017)

B REYER
, J., concurring

ognizing the inevitabili ty of delays in light of constitutional requirements needed to ensure procedural and substan

tive validity of death sentences); see ante, at 1 (G INSBURG

, J., concurring). Rather than develop a constitutional jurisprudence that focuses upon the special circumstances of the aged, how

ever, I believe it would be wiser to reconsider the root cause of the problem—the constitutionality of the death penalty itself. Glossip

, supra, at ___ (B REYER , J., dissent

ing) (slip op., at 1).