Court Opinion

ID: 9498732
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:26:34.904218+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:02.356027
License: Public Domain

WILKINSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
“[T]he Eighth Amendment forbids the execution only of those who are unaware of the punishment they are about to suffer and why they are to suffer it.” Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399, 422, 106 S.Ct. 2595, 91 L.Ed.2d 335 (1986) (Powell, J., concurring in part and concurring in the *179judgment). Judges called upon to interpret the Eighth Amendment may not engage in metaphysical inquiries under the guise of constitutional interpretation, but neither may they abdicate their responsibility to provide content to an express constitutional guarantee.
The Powell test appreciates that the Constitution does not countenance judicial forays into inherently philosophical arenas. Nowhere does the Eighth Amendment mandate that a defendant understand the end of life in a particular way before he may be executed. The amendment provides no definition of death, and it certainly does not license judges to discover one. That task is well beyond our competence and authority, and is best left to religious leaders, scientists, philosophers, and the private recesses of individual belief. The multiplicity of views on this most sensitive and intimate of subjects all but guarantees that any definition of death — even one as seemingly generic as “the end of physical life”- — -will fail to respect the views of many who may not see death in this way.
At the same time, Justice Powell’s test recognizes that the Eighth Amendment must provide a meaningful independent check on the coercive exercise of state power. This cannot occur if competency is simply a rote formality devoid of any actual insight into a defendant’s mental capacity. The mere ability to recite magic words such as “death” and “punishment,” for example, is insufficient by itself to demonstrate comprehension of the significant sanction to be imposed.
The question is how to avoid a subjective and non-inclusive definition of death, without allowing competency to become a meaningless concept. Justice Powell sought to resolve this tension by requiring under the Eighth Amendment an objective, individualized inquiry into a particular defendant’s mental competence. That is precisely what took place here. As the majority recognizes, the district court was in the best position to evaluate Walton’s mental state, and it applied the Powell test in an exceedingly careful and thorough fashion. It conducted two evidentiary hearings, heard testimony from Walton himself as wqll as multiple witnesses for each side who had interviewed him, and took the additional step of commissioning a psychiatric examination of its own. Judge Shedd’s majority opinion reflects in its own conscientious fashion the care taken in this weighty matter by the trial court, and I concur in it in full.