Like I said, there’s nothing positive to be said about John Errol Ferguson. He was a horror. His execution, scheduled for Thursday, might even bring a perverse notion of justice for two of his accomplices in the Carol City massacre. They’re long gone. Marvin Francois went to the electric chair in 1985. And Beauford James White, who never fired a shot that day, was electrocuted two years later.
But the righteous sense of retribution that’s supposed to come with killing a killer might go lacking in Ferguson’s case, given that the guy they’re strapping onto the death gurney thinks the Florida Department of Corrections is only preparing him for heavenly ascension, and that he’ll soon be heading back our way as the “Prince of God,” the very heir apparent to the creator (with whom he has had many intimate conversations) on a heavenly mission to bust up a big communist plot.
Ferguson is crazy. He’s delusional. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. He lacks what his lawyer calls “rational appreciation of the death penalty.” Even for fervent advocates of capital punishment, that’s got to take a bit of the fun out of execution day.
His madness was not some recent, feigned malady, contrived during his 34 years on death row to keep him out of the death chamber. Court records document that Ferguson was diagnosed back in 1965 with “visual hallucinations.” After a series of felony arrests, and a gunshot wound to the head, he was trucked off to state mental institutions in 1971, where a psychiatrist decided he was a paranoid schizophrenic with “severely damaged ability to distinguish right from wrong.” Another doctor that year recommended a long commitment in a mental hospital rather than bother with a criminal trial, given that Ferguson suffered “from a major mental disorder which prevents him from aiding counsel.”
In 1973, he had “deteriorated to a psychotic state.” In 1974, he was found “grossly psychotic.” And yet another doctor said Ferguson “did not know right from wrong nor the nature and consequences of his acts.” And in 1975, a court-appointed doctor echoed that finding, adding “The degree of irrationality coupled with a rather impulsive, explosive and aggressive nature makes him a rather dangerous person both to himself and to others.” Another declared Ferguson a “paranoidally disturbed person with many somatic delusions and many ideas of a rather bizarre and persecutory nature.”
And finally a diagnosis in 1975 came with a warning that reads, in retrospect, like prophecy. “He has a long-standing, severe illness which will most likely require long-term inpatient hospitalization. This man is dangerous and cannot be released under any circumstances.
Yet, in an act of bureaucratic insanity, less than a year later Ferguson was released from state custody, this diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who was delusional and impulsive and explosive and aggressive and dangerous
The Guardian posts, "Florida inmate found fit to be executed despite history of mental illness," by Ed Pilkington, reporting from New York.
David Glant, a judge with Florida's eighth circuit, has found that John Ferguson, 64, can be given lethal injections next Thursday despite a US supreme court injunction that prohibits executions of the insane. In his concluding remarks, the judge agrees with the prisoner's defence lawyers that Ferguson is a paranoid schizophrenic who genuinely believes he is "Prince of God".
The judge accepts that the prisoner has a "long history of mental illness" and finds there is no evidence to support the prosecution contention, made over several years, that Ferguson was pretending to be mentally ill in order to avoid execution. Yet he goes on to conclude that "there is no evidence that his mental illness interferes, in any way, with his 'rational understanding' of the fact of his pending execution and the reason for it".
Astoundingly, the judge goes on to say that the prisoner's "grandiose delusion" of himself as being akin to Jesus at the point of his resurrection is in fact "relatively normal Christian belief". He writes: "There is no evidence that Ferguson's belief as to his role in the world and what may happen to him in the afterlife is so significantly different from beliefs other Christians may hold so as to consider it a sign of insanity."
Ferguson's legal team has appealed the ruling to the Florida supreme court and an initial hearing is likely to be held on Monday. Pending a final appeal to the US supreme court, the highest judicial panel in the land, the prisoner he will face execution by 4pm on Thursday.
"This is a guy with long-standing mental health issues that stretch over four decades, with 30 different doctors having diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, including Florida state and court-appointed doctors. And yet he is sane enough to be executed?" said Ben Lewis, one of Ferguson's defence lawyers.
Earlier coverage of John Ferguson's case begins at the link.
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