Protect Vulnerable Populations with Severe Mental Illnesses
Support safeguard legislation that exempts those with extreme mental health conditions from capital punishment.
Take action and let members of the Arizona legislature know people with serious mental illness need protection from capital punishment and Arizona should not continue execution of the mentally ill.
In Arizona, over one million adults have a mental health condition but over 2.8 million live in a community that does not have enough mental health professionals. 10,979 Arizonans are homeless and 1 in 6 live with a serious mental illness.
People with Serious Mental Illness (SMI) are at significant risk when they encounter the criminal justice system.
They are more likely to make false confessions to police.
They are less likely to understand and participate in the legal process, including helping their attorneys, defending themselves, and making rational decisions based on an understanding of the charges being brought against them.
This makes people with SMI, as a group, uniquely vulnerable to wrongful convictions and execution.
Nearly one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness. However, mental illnesses include many different conditions that vary in degree of severity, ranging from mild to moderate to severe. Serious Mental Illness (SMI) is a smaller and more severe subset of conditions that impact peoples daily life.
Many Arizonans struggle to get the help they need. 10,979 people in Arizona are homeless and 1 in 6 live with a serious mental illness. In Arizona, 257,000 adults have a serious mental illness. 1,030,000 adults in Arizona have a mental health condition.
People with mental illness are overrepresented in our nation's criminal justice system. Tragically, this has resulted in people with serious mental illness making up a significant number of those who are sentenced to death or executed.
This small group of people who live with serious mental illness like, schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder, Schizoaffective Disorder, and Delusional Disorder are at high risk for encounters with the criminal justice system. 1 in 4 people with a serious mental illness have been arrested by the police at some point in their lifetime – leading to over 2 million jail bookings of people with serious mental illness each year. About 2 in 5 adults in jail or prison have a history of mental illness. Mental illness can also develop from traumatic brain injuries that go untreated because of limited or no access to healthcare.
The only groups who are categorically exempt from the death penalty are juveniles and people with intellectual disabilities. The law recognizes they are inherently less culpable than fully functioning defendants due to their respective mental states. Like these two groups, people with SMI face similar circumstances that impair rational decision-making and the capacity to understand the wrongful nature of their actions fully.
Arizona has 110 people on death row with more than 20 who have exhausted their appeals and several of those individuals who have exhausted appeals suffer from severe mental illness. DPAA estimates that roughly 8% of those currently on death row have a SMI condition.
It is critical that protection intervention be implemented to protect one of most vulnerable populations. Sadly, Arizona has already recently proved that killing those who are mentally ill can and will be done as long as there are no protections. Download and share our PDF information sheet below.
Serious Mental Illness in 2022
Clarence Dixon, 66
Executed: May 11th, 2022
Clarence Dixon was executed on May 11th, 2022. He was sentenced to death in 2008 for a killing that happened 30 years earlier, while civil commitment proceedings were pending.
At the time of his execution, Clarence was suffering from chronic illness including blindness and schizophrenia which he had a long documented history.
In 1977, Mr. Dixon was charged with assault for hitting a stranger with a metal pipe. He was diagnosed with severe depression and schizophrenia, adjudicated incompetent to stand trial, and sent to a state hospital for treatment.
In January 1978, Mr. Dixon was found not guilty by reason of insanity by then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day O’Connor, who ordered prosecutors to keep him in custody until civil commitment proceedings could begin within 10 days, instead, he was released without any supervision or treatment.
Two days later, a college student named Deana Lynne Bowdoin was raped and murdered. In 2001, DNA testing linked Clarence to the crime and he was charged with capital murder.
Mr. Dixon was allowed to fire his court-appointed lawyers and represent himself at his trial in 2008. His defense was based on his delusional belief that a government conspiracy was behind the charges. He was convicted and sentenced to death. He was already serving a life prison sentence for separately attacking a Northern Arizona University student in 1985. Clarence was no longer a danger to society as he had been incarcerated for over sixteen years.
While incarcerated he continued to file numerous lawsuits and motions arguing this conspiracy theory. Because Clarence represented himself, the jury never learned that he was legally insane at the time of the crime or about his lifelong history of severe mental illness, which started with severe depression and suicidal ideations as a young child.
On April 8th, 2022 Clarence’s lawyers filed a motion to stay his execution, arguing that he did not rationally understand the reason for his execution and therefore is incompetent to be executed under the Constitution.
The trial court held a hearing 8 days before the date of his execution where Clarence’s lawyers presented evidence of his schizophrenia and his documented history of delusions, auditory and visual hallucinations, and paranoid ideation.
An experienced psychiatrist who had interviewed Mr. Dixon in person multiple times over the last 11 years testified that Mr. Dixon had schizophrenia, was delusional and irrational, and believed he was being executed because of a government conspiracy.
The court issued its opinion the same day, finding that Clarence “has a mental disorder or mental illness of schizophrenia” but that his mental state was not “so distorted by this mental illness that he lacks a rational understanding of the State’s rationale for his execution.
Clarence did not understand why he was being executed for a crime he maintained he did NOT know the victim.
Clarence’s last words were “Maybe I will see you on the other side, Deana. I don't know you and I don't remember you.”
A haunting reminder the man being executed was not culpable of the crime he would die for. Clarence Dixon is not an isolated incident but an example of why it is so important that we focus our efforts to protect vulnerable populations at risk for capital punishment outcomes.