Despite protests that executing a mentally ill killer is unfair and inhumane, a paranoid schizophrenic was sent to his death in the electric chair early Friday.
Varnall Weeks made no final statement before he was executed just after midnight for the 1981 murder of a veterinary school student. His final appeal was unanimously rejected Thursday by the U.S. Supreme Court.Weeks, 43, was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic by several experts and spent six months in a state mental hospital in the 1970s.
"My brother is insane, and he's been insane ever since childhood and I grew up with him," Lester Weeks said. "What is this country coming to? Are we going back to the witching days when we kill and burn people for being insane?"
Weeks' death hinged on the difference between mental illness and mental incompetence.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that it is cruel and unusual punishment to execute someone who is mentally incompetent.
In April, a state judge declared Weeks mentally ill but ruled that he was competent to be put to death because he understood why he was being executed.
Weeks once told a judge that death was an adventure and that he heard the voice of God in thunder. In statements to psychiatrists - including one who said Weeks lived in a "web of delusions" - he said he would be reincarnated as a tortoise.
Weeks was convicted in the October 1981 robbery and slaying of Mark Anthony Batts, a 24-year-old Tuskegee Institute student from Murfreesboro, Tenn.
At his trial, Weeks asked for the death penalty. He later appealed the sentence, but his pleadings were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court a total of four times.