Texas wants to execute a man who did not understand what the death penalty meant when he was sentenced.

That is not rhetoric. It is the sworn testimony of Dr. Fred Fason, the psychiatrist who examined Jamaal Howard and concluded that he lacked a rational understanding of the charges against him and the consequences if convicted. When Fason tried to explain that Jamaal could die for what happened, Jamaal laughed. Not out of cruelty. Not out of defiance. He laughed the way people in the grip of schizophrenia laugh...at inappropriate moments, at things no one else can see, at a world that no longer functions in any coherent order.

This case has been litigated as a story about lawyers and courts. It is not. It is a story about a mind...a mind that broke. Jamaal's mind was measured and found gravely impaired. Every doctor who ever examined him described Jamaal's mind the same way…broken. Everything else...the bumbling defense, the rubber-stamped findings, the all-white juries...matters only because it allowed Texas to condemn that mind without ever truly looking at it. Mental illness and intellectual disability are not arguments among many here…they are the whole case.

The mind that broke

In May of 2000, Jamaal Howard, a young Black man in Hardin County, Texas, killed Vickie Swartout in the course of a robbery. A life was taken, and nothing here asks anyone to forget it. But the death penalty demands a second question: what was the state of the man who did it? On that question the record speaks with one voice, and it has never stopped speaking.

The people who knew Jamaal longest saw it first. Sandra Johnson had known him all his life. Before the crime, she watched him become dirty, vacant, unable to recognize her on the street. In the courtroom, he did not recognize her either. Tyre Thomas, a jailer who had known him since childhood, described a changed man...talking to himself, swinging between moods, needing to be told to bathe and brush his teeth. He complied when told. He caused no trouble. He was just not fully there.

The doctors saw it next. Dr. Duncan, court-appointed, found Jamaal's cognitive functioning so inconsistent that he sometimes could not produce intelligible speech...mumbling in low tones, needing the same question repeated again and again. He smiled and chuckled at nothing, and Duncan was left wondering what Jamaal was responding to. Duncan concluded his mental state was actively declining and his ability to assist his own attorney was in serious doubt, with schizophrenia and other organic brain factors consistently at work.

Dr. Fason went further. Jamaal could not complete basic standard psychological tests because he did not understand words like "mechanics" or "appetite." His answers bore no relation to the questions asked. He laughed at the wrong moments...which Fason named as one of the cardinal signs of schizophrenia. Fason's diagnosis was exactly that: schizophrenia. And underneath it lay something the jury never heard...in 1997, at seventeen years old, Jamaal had been shot in the head. A traumatic brain injury, sitting in the medical records, three years before the crime. Notes from the day of his arrest pointed to active mental illness. The worst external event to happen to his brain was never presented.

Then the State's own prisons confirmed everything. Within months of his death sentence, Jamaal was transferred from death row to the prison system's psychiatric unit...withdrawn, mute, urinating on the walls, deteriorating. He was given Haldol, Cogentin and Zoloft. He improved, was discharged, and declined again. He mutilated himself. His Haldol was raised to the maximum dosage. Admission after admission, the diagnosis settled into permanence: chronic schizophrenia. An early jailhouse label of antisocial personality disorder faded and vanished. Every doctor who examined him thereafter...every single one...reached the same conclusion…chronic schizophrenia.

This is not a theory constructed for appeal. It is a quarter-century of unanimous medical judgment, much of it generated by the State of Texas itself. The man the State proposes to strap to a gurney is a man whose sanity is held together, day by day, with the maximum allowable doses of antipsychotic medications. Texas has spent twenty-five years treating the very illness its courts declared he did not have.

The mind that was measured

Schizophrenia is a component of who Jamaal Howard is. The other half is intellectual disability.

The US Constitution does not merely counsel mercy when it comes to intellectual disability. It commands it.

In Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment forbids executing people with intellectual disability, because their impairments diminish personal culpability and make the death penalty's purposes...retribution and deterrence...incoherent as applied to them. Jamaal's numbers place him inside that protection. Dr. Duncan administered the verbal portions of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and placed his intellectual functioning in the 65-to-70 range. He described Jamaal as operating at the level of an eleven- or twelve-year-old child.

When the prosecutor pointed out that Jamaal had once passed school achievement tests, Duncan's answer only deepened the tragedy: that would indicate deterioration. Fason found that Jamaal's intellectual functioning collapsed after second grade...a drop of more than sixty percentile points in math across seven years. A child's mind that once worked, coming apart through his entire childhood, then struck by a bullet at seventeen, then swallowed by psychosis at twenty. Intellectual disability and mental illness are usually argued as separate claims. In Jamaal, they are one continuous catastrophe.

Now the procedural scandal. Jamaal was tried before Atkins was decided. When his lawyers raised intellectual disability afterwards, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the claim under Ex parte Briseno...the notorious Texas standard that measured disability against lay stereotypes rather than clinical science. In 2017, in Moore v. Texas, the Supreme Court specifically repudiated Briseno. The framework used to deny Jamaal's claim no longer exists because the nation's highest court found it constitutionally intolerable.

Sit with that. A man with test scores in the protected range and documented cognitive collapse had his claim denied under a standard the Supreme Court has since struck down...and no court has ever revisited the question under valid law. He unquestionably is…at this very moment…a man the Constitution categorically forbids Texas to kill. Texas intends to kill him anyway.

The mind no one defended

Jamaal's trial matters because of what it did to the evidence of his condition: it buried it.

His attorney, Tyrone Moncriffe, was paid $35,000 to defend a capital case against a client who could not reliably communicate. He never filed a single pleading raising competency, intellectual disability or insanity...the three issues that were the case. He announced an insanity plea orally, halfway through jury selection, and then never had Jamaal examined for insanity by anyone. He requested a competency evaluation orally, the day before jury selection began...and only because Dr. Fason told him he had to. When Duncan returned a report questioning competence, Moncriffe did not speak with him until the day Duncan took the stand, a fact confirmed in open court. It was the prosecutor...the man seeking Jamaal's death...who finally had to move for a competency trial, because Jamaal's own lawyer would not.

And when the illness did reach a jury, it nearly saved him. The first competency jury heard Dr. Fason and hung. They could not agree that this man was competent to be tried. Days later, at the second competency trial, Moncriffe did not call Fason at all. No explanation has ever been offered. Stripped of the expert whose testimony had deadlocked the first jury, the second jury...all white...found Jamaal competent in forty-seven minutes.

At punishment, Fason told Moncriffe to hire a mitigation expert to develop Jamaal's life history. He never did. His entire mitigation strategy was to ask witnesses whether both families were hurting. The gunshot wound went unmentioned. The arrest-day evidence of psychosis went unmentioned. The confession of a man who could not define "appetite" went unchallenged...and the prosecution wielded it, again and again, as proof that Jamaal was calculating and remorseless. Calculating. A man functioning at the level of a twelve-year-old, sliding into schizophrenia, portrayed to a death-qualified jury as a cold strategist...because his lawyer never gave them the truth. Under findings of Strickland and Wiggins, that is deficient performance. Under the Fifth Circuit's own precedents, failing to investigate a client's mental health history after clear notice of it is very nearly indefensible. And the prejudice is obvious: a single juror who saw the whole picture could have chosen life. One jury, shown part of the picture, already refused to agree he was even competent.

The mind no court would see

Defenders of this execution will say the courts have reviewed the case. They have processed it. Jamaal's state habeas application sat for nine years. The judge who tried the case was replaced by a judge who never saw a witness. In 2012, eleven years after trial, that new judge signed the State's proposed findings word for word, without a single evidentiary hearing...findings declaring that Jamaal was not mentally ill, at the very moment the record contained years of the prison system's own psychiatric admissions and a consistent diagnosis of chronic schizophrenia. The federal courts then deferred to that fiction, and the Fifth Circuit refused even a certificate of appealability. At no point has any judge, state or federal, held a hearing on the central reality of this case: the condition of Jamaal Howard's mind.

What execution would mean

Strip away the citations and this is what remains. A boy whose mind began failing after second grade. A teenager shot in the head at seventeen. A twenty-year-old, descending into psychosis, who committed a terrible crime. A defendant who laughed because he could not comprehend his own death sentence. A prisoner whose illness the State has diagnosed, documented and maximally medicated for a quarter of a century.

The death penalty, its defenders insist, is reserved for the worst of the worst...those who choose evil with a clear mind. Jamaal Howard has never had a clear mind. Retribution against a man who cannot rationally understand his punishment is not justice. Deterrence aimed at a mind that cannot reason is a fiction. What remains is only killing...the blind infliction of death on a man the Constitution protects twice over, once for his disability and once for his disease.

Vickie Swartout deserves to be honored with truth. The truth is that executing Jamaal Howard will not restore her and will not express society's considered moral judgment, because that judgment was never rendered. It was defaulted by a lawyer, rubber-stamped by a judge and averted by every court since. Jamaal Howard should not be executed. He should receive what his broken and diminished mind has never once been given in twenty-six years: a fair hearing, before people willing to look at the whole of him. Anything less is not law. It is momentum. And surely, momentum is not a reason to kill a child…or a man that functions like one.