In blocking the execution of a Texas killer, the Supreme...

In blocking the execution of a Texas killer, the Supreme Court revealed interest in a new area of capital punishment: the mentally ill.The court ruled earlier in 2002 that mentally retarded defendants cannot be executed, and last month the justices revealed a bitter division over whether people who were minors when they committed capital crimes should be put to death.Those two issues have overshadowed questions about whether some of America's 3,700 death row inmates are too mentally ill to be executed."It hasn't gotten as much attention, but I think it deserves attention," Atlanta death row lawyer Stephen Bright said.The Supreme Court issued a last-minute stay that stopped the execution of 42-year-old James Colburn, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, hears voices and has repeatedly tried to kill himself. Colburn's lawyers asked the Supreme Court to loosen the rules to let federal courts consider whether some mentally ill death row inmates are too unstable to be executed.Bright said the issue, although narrow, is important."Lurking in the background," Bright said, "is the much larger and important question, 'Whether people who are as profoundly mentally ill as this man is should be put to death at all."'The Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that executing an insane person would violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. However, death penalty opponents like Bright argue that few mentally ill people can meet the definition: they must be incapable of understanding why they are being put to death.Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said mental illness should not preclude execution."Everybody in prison can find somebody to testify that he has some kind of mental problem.," Scheidegger said. "You could be opening a whole set of challenges. We could never punish anybody."If justices review Colburn's case, they will follow up on a 1998 ruling that a federal law intended to speed the pace of executions does not restrict some claims by death row inmates that they are too insane to be put to death."Mr. Colburn has the reasoning ability of a 10-year-old child," said James Rytting, one of his attorneys from Houston. "We want to get a hearing in order to contest the state's claim that it's OK to kill this man."