Is It Cruel and Unusual to Execute a Man With Dementia?
Vernon Madison has no memory of murdering a police officer.
“Do you remember your first day of school?” Justice Elena Kagan asked in a death-penalty opinion released Wednesday. “Probably not. But if your mother told you years later that you were sent home for hitting a classmate, you would have no trouble grasping the story. And similarly, if you somehow blacked out a crime you committed, but later learned what you had done, you could well appreciate the State’s desire to impose a penalty.”
That question—when can the state impose the ultimate penalty on a condemned prisoner who, because of dementia, can’t remember the crime?—is at issue in ,which the Court
