Ninety-eight year old federal judge wants to hear cases again

A federal judge who has been sidelined for three years over questions about her competency is asking the Supreme Court to throw her a lifeline, reported NPR. Judge Pauline Newman is 98 years old — and she wants a chance to hear cases again.

Her story shines a light on the aging judiciary, where the average age of federal jurists is 69. Lifetime tenure is now raising thorny questions about retirement.

Newman, a President Ronald Reagan appointee who has been on the court for nearly four decades, insists that she remains physically and mentally fit to decide matters of the law, and has accused her colleagues of making baseless claims in an effort to push her out because of her age.

Federal judges serve for life--no mandatory retirement, no limit on how long they serve.

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Man forgotten on death row has sentence overturned after 48 years

Texas’ highest criminal court has overturned the death sentence of a Harris County man who was on death row for nearly half a century, reported The Texas Tribune.

Clarence Curtis Jordan, 70, was first convicted in 1978 of murdering Joe L. Williams, a 40-year-old Houston grocer. Jordan, who is intellectually disabled, was then found in subsequent years to be incompetent and therefore could not be executed. But for almost four decades, he did not have an attorney to advocate for him and was seemingly forgotten on death row.

Jordan was finally appointed a new attorney in 2024 as news emerged that there were numerous delayed criminal appeals in Harris County, some of which were lost for more than a decade. The revelation came amid an effort by the county to reduce the backlog in its criminal courts.

Following new legal advocacy, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vacated Jordan’s death sentence in a Thursday ruling. The panel also sent the case back to Harris County for a new punishment proceeding.

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CREATORS: Jails and Prisons Responsible for Brunt of Mental Health Care

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
September 9, 2025

Milton Dusky was 33 years old and suffering from Schizophrenia. He was experiencing visual hallucinations, depression and alcoholism. He was under the influence of alcohol and drugs when he accompanied two teenage boys across state lines and raped a young girl.

He was arrested and charged with a federal crime. He had an evaluation that found he was "oriented to time, place, and person," and competent to stand trial. In 1958, he was convicted and appealed.

In 1960, Dusky's case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The High Court made a significant ruling regarding competency to stand trial. The court moved away from an analysis that considered whether an accused is "oriented to time and place and (has) some recollection of events" to a finding that an accused has "sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding — and whether he has a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceeding against him."

Competency is often confused with insanity. Competency is a determination of whether an accused can be tried for a crime. Insanity is a determination of whether an accused is responsible for a crime.

The M'Naghten Rule is the legal standard to determine a defendant's legal insanity and criminal responsibility at the time an offense was committed. It is not a clinical assessment of a person's basic awareness. It asks two central questions, based on the defendant's mental state at the time of the crime:

— Did the defendant know the nature and quality of the act they were doing?

— If they did, did they know that what they were doing was wrong?

Although the standards for competency and insanity are different, the impact on the accused can often be very similar and equally troubling. The Marshall Project recently examined what happens to an accused who is suspected of being incompetent. Some people can languish in jail for months and months waiting for a competency evaluation.

As The Marshall Project pointed out, "In the most severe cases, a court can issue a permanent finding of incompetence. Numerous states have long backlogs of criminal defendants waiting for 'competency restoration' before they can be tried in court."

Competency restoration is a term of art in the criminal justice system. An accused who is deemed incompetent is entitled to treatment that can stabilize the individual and enable that person, with medication and therapy, to aid in their defense and stand trial. Ideally, the treatment is provided at a forensic hospital. Unfortunately, those beds are scarce in most states, and individuals suffering from mental illness stay in jail until a bed is available.

One of the states with a waitlist for competency restoration is Pennsylvania. According to an investigation by Spotlight PA, "The (Pennsylvania) Department of Corrections and county jails have unintentionally become the largest providers of behavioral health services in the Commonwealth and are not sufficiently prepared and resourced to meet this population's needs."

To back up the findings, Spotlight PA teamed up with PrimeCare, a private contractor that provides healthcare to 37 jails across Pennsylvania, and the Lehigh Valley Justice Institute to review 10 years of mental healthcare data.

An analysis found that more than 60% of inmates screened for mental health problems needed services while incarcerated.

The nationwide shift away from civil commitment treatment beds toward forensic treatment is a huge part of the problem, Jerri Clark, a research and advocacy manager for the Treatment Advocacy Center, told The Marshal Project. "Punishment is never going to magically create insight for someone who is deeply unwell," Clark said. "You cannot punish someone out of their delusional thinking."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino 

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Utah set to send wheelchair bound man with dementia to firing squad

 A Utah judge set an execution date for a man with dementia who has been on death row for 37 years, even as his lawyers file appeals and argue his condition is worsening, reported The Associated Press.

Ralph Leroy Menzies, 67, is set to be executed Sept. 5 for abducting and killing Utah mother of three Maurine Hunsaker in 1986. When given a choice decades ago, Menzies selected a firing squad as his method of execution. He would become only the sixth U.S. prisoner executed by firing squad since 1977.

Judge Matthew Bates signed the death warrant a month after he ruled Menzies “consistently and rationally” understands why he is facing execution despite recent cognitive decline. Attorneys for Menzies have petitioned the court for a reassessment, but Bates said Wednesday that the pending appeal was not a basis to stop him from setting a date.

Bates did, however, schedule a July 23 hearing to evaluate the new competency petition. Menzies’ attorneys say his dementia has gotten so severe that he uses a wheelchair, is dependent on oxygen and cannot understand his legal case.

“We remain hopeful that the courts or the clemency board will recognize the profound inhumanity of executing a man who is experiencing steep cognitive decline and significant memory loss,” said Lindsey Layer, an attorney for Menzies. “Taking the life of someone with a terminal illness who is no longer a threat to anyone and whose mind and identity have been overtaken by dementia serves neither justice nor human decency.”

The Utah Attorney General’s Office has “full confidence” in the judge’s decision, Assistant Attorney General Daniel Boyer said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has at times spared prisoners with dementia from execution, including an Alabama man in 2019 who had killed a police officer. If a defendant cannot understand why they are being put to death, the high court said, then an execution is not carrying out the retribution that society is seeking.

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Incompetent Missourian inmates wait up to 14 months for mental health treatment

In Missouri some people who are arrested and found incompetent to stand trial are ordered into mental health treatment designed to allow them to have their day in court — a process called competency restoration that generally includes therapy and medication.

However, the average time these individuals wait in jail before receiving treatment is 14 months, according to the Missouri Independent.

Efforts to remedy the problem in the 2023 legislative session, including through a pilot program and increasing outpatient competency restoration, have been slow to get off the ground. 

Greene County, which was included in the pilot program, decided not to participate. Clay County’s program was in operation for just three weeks last year before staff turnover put it on pause. 

Only three people are currently enrolled in the jail-based treatment pilot program statewide, according to Debra Walker, a spokesperson for the state's Department of Mental Health. And only one person is currently in the outpatient treatment program.

Walker said the agency is working on solutions but “none of them will impact the numbers quickly.”

Last year, Department of Mental Health Director Valerie Huhn told the House budget committee the problem would get much worse before it gets better. 

“It’s probably going to be 1,000 individuals,” Huhn said, “long before we’re at 100 individuals.”

‘Deprives them of humanity’   

Mary Fox, the director of the Missouri State Public Defender system, said the wait times for mental health treatment are the worst she’s seen. She has been going to courthouses throughout the state trying to get some of the cases dismissed.

Public defenders have identified at least 12 cases of individuals in Missouri being held longer than their maximum sentences would have been, Fox said, without receiving competency restoration.

“It's gotten so bad that people aren't getting any treatment within the time period of when their case should be over and done with,” Fox said.

One client was having paranoid delusions and called the police himself, convinced he was being watched. The police then arrested him because his license plate was expired and because he didn’t stop driving when they put on their lights. 

Fox said he’s waited in jail for longer than he would’ve for the maximum sentence on those two charges.

In a recent case filing, Fox called detention beyond the maximum sentence “unconstitutional, illegal and improper.”

Walker said the agency is “aware of such circumstances.”

“Individuals are admitted in the order in which the court order is received, and admissions are triaged based upon clinical acuity,” she said, adding that DMH is also working to provide medication and case management to individuals while in jail, through mobile teams of clinicians.

While individuals wait in jail, their mental health often deteriorates, said Annie Legomsky, who runs the state public defense system’s holistic defense services program. 

Many are placed in solitary confinement, isolated for 23 or 24 hours a day, she said, and can end up with irreparable damage.

“It just completely deprives them of humanity, and it’s the antithesis of anything you could call a therapeutic environment,” she said. “We see clients who do just really sad things like eating their own feces, having suicidal ideation and actions, who are just completely decompensating.”

And there isn’t anything those individuals can do: Their case is on hold until they’re restored to competency to stand trial, so they can’t get released after they’ve waited the maximum sentence.

“They can't do anything to, kind of, control their fate,” Legomsky said. “They're at the mercy of (the Department of Mental Health) getting them the treatment they need.” 

In states including Oklahoma, Kansas, and Washington, lawsuits filed by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union over similar wait times have succeeded, arguing the practice violates individuals’ rights to due process and the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

So far, similar litigation hasn’t been filed in Missouri. A spokesperson for the ACLU of Missouri declined to comment. 

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White supremacist leader of Aryan gang executed in Texas

The 19th Execution of 2019

On Oct. 6, 2016, Justen Hall, acting as his own attorney, wrote to a district court in El Paso, asking that it dismiss the appeals filed on his behalf and set his execution date. "These walls 24/7 have broken me," he stated. "I need to be put down like the rabid dog I am."

He got his wish. Hall was executed on November 6, 2019 for the strangulation murder of a woman in 2002, reported the El Paso Times.

Hall, 38, had been on Texas' death row since 2005 when he was sentenced to die after being convicted of capital murder in the strangulation of 29-year-old Melanie Ruth Billhartz in 2002.

The killing of Billhartz occurred while Hall was out on bond on another murder charge, the fatal shooting of a transgender woman that was labeled a hate crime.

Hall was a member of the white supremacist Aryan Circle gang and investigators had said that prejudice was a motive in the hate crime killing.

In October 2002, Hall strangled Billhartz to death with a black electrical cord and then buried her body in the New Mexico desert because he feared she would tell police about a methamphetamine cooking operation at a house in El Paso.

Another man had assaulted Billhartz during an argument and Hall and other gang members feared the meth operation would be discovered after Billhartz threatened to call police to report the assault.

Police had said Hall was the first person in El Paso to be charged with murder while out on bail on another murder charge.

Hall had been previously charged in fatal shooting of 28-year-old Arturo Diaz, who identified as a transgender woman.

On April 10, 2002, Diaz was found dead after being shot in the back off Anapra Road near Sunland Park, New Mexico, according to El Paso Times archives.

The two possibly met at a gay bar in Downtown El Paso, where Hall had been seen hanging around for some time before the killing, according to news archives.

Hall's indictment alleged he was motivated by prejudice over Diaz's sexual orientation, and the killing was classified as a hate crime.

Hall's bond in that murder was set at $75,000 by a municipal judge, and Hall paid $7,500 to get out of jail.

Hall was 21 years old at the time of Billhartz's killing on Oct. 28, 2002.

But at a March 2017 court hearing, Hall told a judge his request for DNA testing was a "stall tactic," the Associated Press reported.

"I killed Melanie, and I killed Arturo. And I accept the punishment for it, and I'm ready to get it over with, you know," said Hall, who stopped talking to his attorneys and asked that appeals be stopped.

Hall was the 19th inmate put to death this year in the U.S. and the eighth in Texas. Three more executions are scheduled in Texas this year.

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Police in Illinois charge 9-year-old with five counts of first-degree murder

A 9-year-old has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder in connection with a lethal mobile-home fire in April near Goodfield, IL, reported the Peoria Journal Star.

The juvenile also has been charged with two counts of arson and one count of aggravated arson, Woodford County State’s Attorney Greg Minger said.

The identity of the suspect was not revealed, given that person’s age. Minger would not divulge additional details about the suspect, including a possible relationship to the victims.

Minger’s decision to prosecute came six months following the blaze April 6 that killed two adults and three children in a residence at Timberline Mobile Home Park.

The fire at 14 Cypress Court began shortly after 11 p.m. on a Saturday. The trailer was engulfed in flames by the time firefighters arrived a few minutes later.Kathryn Murray, 69; Jason Wall, 34; Rose Alwood, 2; Daemeon Wall, 2; and Ariel Wall, 1, died of smoke inhalation, autopsies revealed.

There were two survivors — Katrina Alwood, who was 27 at the time of the fire, and her juvenile son.

Katrina Alwood and Jason Wall, who were engaged to be married, were parents of Ariel Wall and Daemeon Wall. Rose Alwood was a niece. Murray was Katrina Alwood’s grandmother.

Minger said he went through various authoritative reports about the blaze numerous times before he decided to proceed with prosecution.

“It was a heavy decision,” he said. “It’s a tragedy, but at the end of the day it’s charging a very young person with one of the most serious crimes we have.

“But I just think it needs to be done at this point, for finality.”

He said the aggravated-arson charge suggests the suspect knew others were present when the fire was set.

Earlier, Woodford County Coroner Tim Ruestman ruled the fire was started intentionally.

The fire site is just northeast of Goodfield. The village of about 1,000 residents is located along Interstate 74 between Peoria and Bloomington-Normal.

No arrest warrant is to be issued for the suspect, Minger said. He wasn’t certain about the minimum age threshold for imprisoning a minor.

The suspect is to be appointed an attorney and will be subject to a bench trial, in front of a judge, according to Minger. No jury is to be empaneled.

If convicted, the suspect could be placed on probation for at least five years but not beyond the age of 21, the state’s attorney said. Therapy, counseling and psychological evaluation would be likely.

Incarceration is not an option, Minger suggested.

“Probation, given the age, is about the only outcome that could happen here,” he said.

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Judge cancels killer's execution amid questions of competency

A Texas judge has withdrawn a death row inmate's execution date amid questions that he may not be mentally competent to be put to death, reported the Texas Tribune.

On Thursday, less than two weeks before Randall Mays’ scheduled Oct. 16 execution, Judge Joe Clayton of Henderson County withdrew the death warrant. Mays’ attorneys had filed a motion to find him incompetent for execution because he was recently diagnosed with schizophrenia and believes he is to be executed because he has a renewable energy design that threatens oil companies.

Clayton said in his order that he stopped the execution to “properly review all medical records submitted.” The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that for an execution to be conducted, the inmate must know that they are about to be executed and why.

Mays, 60, was sentenced to death in 2008 after killing two Henderson County sheriff's deputies in a standoff that began with a domestic disturbance call, according to court records. Mays and his wife were yelling, and a neighbor said Mays was shooting at her, on their property in Payne Springs, a small town southeast of Dallas.

At first, deputies said Mays was calm and polite, and that his wife told them to leave because they were “just having a spat.” When the neighbor wanted to press charges for the gunshots and a deputy attempted to arrest Mays, however, his face changed, court briefings state. He ran inside with a rifle , but continued talking with deputies through a window and at one point outside for about 20 minutes, telling them he feared the deputies would kill him.

Mays then shot two deputies, Tony Ogburn and Paul Habelt, in the heads, killing them. Another deputy was shot in the leg but survived. Mays surrendered after he was shot himself.

In 2015, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stopped Mays’ first scheduled execution because of competency questions, but ultimately the same Henderson County judge found he was fit for execution. A reason for that finding, Mays’ lawyers claim, was because the Texas prison system had not diagnosed or treated Mays for any relevant mental illness at that time.

That has since changed. In 2018, prison mental health officials diagnosed Mays with schizophrenia and other disorders and prescribed him antipsychotics, the lawyers wrote in a motion last month.A forensic psychiatrist who visited Mays before also said that as of August, his cognitive functions and delusional beliefs have worsened. Mays had trouble staying on topic, quickly veered conversation to comments that the guards were poisoning the air vents and was frequently incoherent.

Mays’ execution was the second stopped this week. On Friday, the execution of Randy Halprin, set for Oct. 10, was halted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

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Mentally ill Pennsylvania inmates sit in jail waiting on hospital bed

Pennsylvania is one of many states that has far too few hospital beds for the mentally ill defendants who need them, leaving people to languish in jail while they wait for a spot, reported The Marshall Project. It has ranked among the worst states when it comes to these wait times, a nationwide problem that experts say may be linked to the downsizing of psychiatric hospitals and inadequate community mental-health resources.

In some cases, people facing minor charges have spent longer in jail waiting to go to a hospital than the time they would have served had they been sentenced. State officials across the country are looking for possible solutions, from building more beds to keeping individuals with mental illness out of the justice system entirely.

In Pennsylvania, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the state Department of Human Services in 2015 over these delays, settled twice and has since filed another motion asking the court to intervene.

Data from the state Department of Human Services obtained by The Marshall Project and Frontline show that defendants are finally getting into hospital beds more quickly. As of April, defendants in Pennsylvania waited an average of 24 days to be admitted for “competency restoration”—the legal term for providing basic mental health care so someone is coherent enough to understand the charges against them and assist in their defense. That’s down from the peak of the crisis in January 2017, when defendants had been waiting an average of eight months to get into a hospital and an average of more than a year for Norristown State Hospital.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Human Services said in an email that the agency was working to speed up the system even more, after investing over $63 million since 2016, in part to add 175 more hospital beds, and also funding community treatment options. “We are not able to control the number of referrals we receive for competency restoration treatment,” wrote the spokesperson, Ali Fogarty. “We have been and remain committed to reducing the length of time that individuals in the criminal justice system wait for mental health and psychiatric treatment.”

But wait times are still too long, said Vic Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania ACLU. And as the statewide legal battle plays on, families like Marcelline's are stuck in the middle. The ACLU is now pushing for a seven-day limit; federal courts have ruled that anything longer is a violation of rights. “Keeping them in jail is illegal. And from a health perspective, some of them could suffer irreparable harm,” Walczak said.

Legal battles have also been waged over wait times in Oregon, Colorado, Alabama, Louisiana, Nevada, Utah and Washington. Many states have struggled to comply with court rulings, some racking up millions of dollars in fines and investing millions to build beds to try to meet the need. Civil rights attorneys have filed numerous lawsuits trying to fix this problem by setting strict time limits. But without enforcement, states are routinely blowing past these deadlines.

Attorneys, forensic psychiatrists and hospital administrators say the real problem is a system that fails to distinguish between who needs to be in the justice system and who could be served in a cheaper community setting.

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Lawmakers consider banning death penalty for seriously mentally ill

Lawmakers around the country are considering bans on death sentences for people with certain serious mental illnesses, reported The Marshall Project. Earlier this year, the South Dakota state legislature rejected a proposal to ban death sentences for people with serious mental illnesses, though it had passed such a proposal through one chamber last year. 

The Virginia state senate approved a similar bill three months ago. Other bills are gaining traction in Texas, Ohio, Tennessee and Missouri. Some include post-traumatic stress disorder, while others are limited to schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder. Many require active psychosis at the time of the crime. Some would let a judge decide who should be exempted, before the trial begins. The Texas bill would let a jury decide during the trial. The Tennessee bill requires a documented medical history before the crime, which might exclude someone like Otto.

Supporters of these bills, with the backing of the American Bar Association, argue that the “insanity defense” tends to be very narrowly defined, and juries are skeptical of it. The Supreme Court has already banned the death penalty for people with intellectual disabilities and those who committed their crimes before the age of 18. Both bans were based on the idea that society views these murderers as “categorically less culpable than the average criminal.” The high court has ruled that death row prisoners must be “competent” to be executed, though lower courts are still debating exactly what that means.

“Defendants who have a mental illness are particularly vulnerable in our criminal justice system,” Amanda Marzullo, director of the Texas Defender Service, told a panel of legislators in her state last month. “They are very likely to fire their defense lawyers, or not cooperate with them, or even try to represent themselves.”

Prosecutors have been wary. “The version of this legislation that is pending in Ohio would effectively end the death penalty,” said Louis Tobin, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association. He predicted that everyone facing the punishment would be able to obtain a diagnosis. A defendant can already mount an insanity defense, he pointed out, and then tell the jury about mental illness as a way of persuading them to vote for life without parole instead of death. Ohio’s bill, as of now, would apply retroactively, potentially setting up lengthy legal fights over old cases.

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Only limited stays for competency during habeas appeals

In Ryan v. Gonzales and Tibbals v. Carter the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts have the equitable power to issue limited stays when inmates are incompetent to assist in their habeas proceedings, according to the ABA Journal.

But the unanimous opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas rejected arguments that prisoners have a statutory right to competency stays in habeas appeals that is derived from federal statutes. And Thomas said that, in most cases, an inmate’s mental incompetence during a habeas proceeding will not eviscerate his statutory right to counsel.

“Given the backward-looking, record-based nature of most federal habeashabeas petitioner regardless of the petitioner’s competence,” Thomas said. “Attorneys are quite capable of reviewing the state-court record, identifying legal errors, and marshaling relevant arguments, even without their clients’ assistance.”

Thomas ruled in the consolidated cases of Gonzales and Carter, both on death row. Gonzales was convicted in the stabbing death of an Arizona man during a burglary of his home, while Carter was convicted in the rape and stabbing death of his adoptive grandmother in Ohio. Thomas’ decision could benefit Carter when the courts consider his case on remand.

Thomas said there is no right to competency deriving a federal statute providing for the appointment of counsel for indigent capital defendants pursuing habeas appeals. Nor is there a right in a federal law providing for competency proceedings before trial, or after the beginning of probation or supervised release, he said.

Thomas did acknowledge, however, that federal judges had the equitable power to stay proceedings based on incompetence of a habeas petitioner, reported the ABA Journal.  
To read the full opinion: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/10-930_7k47.pdf