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April 8 (UPI) -- Attorneys for an Arizona death row prisoner filed a motion Friday saying their client isn't mentally competent enough to be executed next month. Clarence Dixon, 66, was sentenced to death in 2008 for the 1978 rape and murder of 21-year-old Deana Bowdoin, an Arizona State University student. His lethal injection is set to take place May 11.
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Dixon was connected to the slaying about two decades later with the enhancement of DNA testing. He had already been serving a life sentence on a 1986 sexual assault conviction.
His lawyers said his execution would violate the 8th Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment, because he has a "well-documented history" of paranoid schizophrenia.
They said two court-appointed psychiatrists found Dixon to be incompetent as part of an unrelated assault case. Then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day O'Connor found Dixon not guilty by reason of insanity in that case.
They said delusions caused by the mental illness keep him from having a rational understanding of his punishment.
The motion filed Friday challenges Arizona's competency statute, which Dixon's attorneys say is in conflict with the federal constitutional standard.
Arizona officials announced plans to set Dixon's execution date in April 2021. At the time, his lawyer, Dale Baich, said his client experienced "chronic neglect" as a child and has had mental illness for decades. He said the murder case rested "almost entirely" on DNA evidence and that other evidence was inconclusive or excluded Dixon.
Arizona last carried out an execution on July, 23, 2014, that of Joseph Wood. It took 15 doses of a new combination of drugs -- midazolam and hydromorphone -- and 2 hours for Wood to die.
He was the second inmate to be given the two-drug cocktail after Arizona lost its European supplier of pentobarbital. The European Union voted in 2011 to prohibit the sale of the drug to the United States because of its use in executions.
After Wood's death, the state decided to no longer use the midazolam and hydromorphone combination of drugs, effectively implementing a moratorium on executions until an alternate drug cocktail could be legally secured.
