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Joseph Corcoran was unquestionably mentally ill when he killed his brother and three other people in a near-northeast side home in 1997. Now, finally, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, it appears a federal court will consider whether it is constitutionally proper to sentence Corcoran to death despite his severe illness.
The Supreme Court ruled this week that the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals erred in upholding the death penalty against Corcoran. It ordered the appeals court to weigh several issues in the case, including Corcoran’s mental illness. The effect of the ruling is to again remove the death penalty hanging over Corcoran, at least for now.
The high court’s order was issued “per curiam,” meaning it was issued in the name of the court, not specific justices. A per curiam ruling is not necessarily unanimous, but it indicates the justices did not consider the decision to be controversial and did not require a massive legal analysis. Indeed, the ruling was just two pages long.
Here is the legal issue:
After Corcoran’s lawyers challenged his death sentence through state courts, which upheld the death penalty, Corcoran had the right to challenge it in federal courts. His lawyers asked a federal judge to throw out the death penalty on five grounds. The late U.S. District Judge Allen Sharp ruled in Corcoran’s favor on one challenge, the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. He told state courts to resentence Corcoran to a penalty other than death.
Sharp failed to rule on the other four grounds; so only the one issue was before the federal appeals court when it reversed Sharp, leaving the other arguments unresolved in the federal courts. “The Seventh Circuit should have permitted the (federal) District Court to consider Corcoran’s unresolved challenges to his death sentence” when it reversed Sharp, the Supreme Court ruled.
One of those challenges concerns Corcoran’s mental illness. The Supreme Court in 2002 banned the execution of inmates with mental retardation, ruling the condition diminishes the culpability of the defendant. Judges have since struggled with determining to what degree mental illness similarly diminishes culpability.
The courts will now likely head down a path of deciding what level of mental illness makes a criminal ineligible for the death penalty.
Increasingly, elected officials and courts are deciding that the death penalty is so arbitrary, that the true guilt of too many defendants remains in question, that it cannot be fairly applied. Corcoran’s lawyers also raise other significant issues, including the constitutionality of the state’s death penalty law.
Corcoran brutally killed four people and deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. But executing a man who is clearly and severely mentally ill in the name of the people has no place in a civilized society.
