AUSTIN, Texas, June 12 (UPI) -- Prosecutors in Texas want a schizophrenic on death row forcibly medicated to make him sane enough to execute.
Steven Staley's case could lead to a definitive ruling on the issue, the Dallas Morning News said. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that inmates too mentally ill to understand why they are being executed cannot be put to death, and has ruled that inmates can be forced to take medication in certain circumstances.
But the high court has never ruled on forcing inmates to take medication so that they can be executed, the newspaper said.
"We're going to go after anybody who's been sentenced to death," Chuck Mallin, chief of Tarrant County's appellate division, told the Morning News. "Our position right now is we're not going to warehouse them, we're going to seek to enforce the judgment of the court until the Court of Criminal Appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court says we can't."
Staley, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, was sentenced to death in 1991 for killing a restaurant manager during a botched robbery after his escape from a Colorado prison.
