This is a picture of Cecil Clayton’s brain:
Notice that gaping black spot in the lower right-hand corner? That’s the part where a piece of wood broke off a log he was working on during a sawmill accident and pierced his skull. According to his attorneys, Clayton lost 7.7 percent of his brain in that accident, or 20 percent of his frontal lobe. After the accident, according to testimony from his brother, Clayton “broke up with his wife, began drinking alcohol and became impatient, unable to work and more prone to violent outbursts.” The particular part of Clayton’s brain that was damaged is the portion which governs judgment and impulse control.
Which probably explains why, in 1996, Clayton shot and killed a police officer.
On Tuesday night, after the Supreme Court of the United States rejected a motion seeking a stay of execution, the state of Missouri executed Clayton. Though the four members of the Court’s liberal bloc — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — would have granted a stay, they only dissented publicly on the question of whether the method Missouri wished to use to execute Clayton was unconstitutional.
It is likely that Clayton is dead today because of a distinction in the Supreme Court’s death penalty cases that it hard to reconcile with those cases’ reasoning. In Atkins v. Virginia, the Court (using an antiquated term for persons with an intellectual disability) held that “death is not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal.” Atkins explained that people with intellectual disabilities “have diminished capacities to understand and process information, to communicate, to abstract from mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, to control impulses, and to understand the reactions of others.”
The same reasoning could also apply to someone with severe brain damage such as Clayton, as it could apply to people with a variety of mental disorders. Yet the justices have not extended Atkins’s logic to other disabilities that cause similarly “diminished capacities.”
Though Clayton’s attorneys did argue to the Supreme Court that he “is ineligible to be executed because of his intellectual disability,” this was a difficult argument to make because clinical definitions of intellectual disability generally provide that “[t]he onset must occur before age 18.” Clayton’s attorneys noted signs of his diminished capacity, such as the fact that he “cannot without assistance order canteen items or navigate the telephone system,” yet, as a technical matter, he does not meet this clinical definition of being intellectually disabled.
Had Clayton been born with the identical brain damage he faced later in life, Atkins may have saved his life. Because he was the victim of an horrific accident and not an accident of birth, however, he fell through a crack in the Court’s precedents.