The Supreme Court Case Of Ford V. Wainwright

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Despite the fact that she was a serial killer who killed several men, the criminal justice system ultimately failed Aileen Wuornos. Convicted for six murders and sentenced to death by lethal injection; she was a product of sexual abused and emotional torture. Her father was a psychopathic pedophile and her mother was young, naïve and simply not ready to be a mother, so Aileen’s grandparents raised her and her brother. Her grandfather sexually abused both her and her brother, which was a strong factor that caused her to turn out the way she did, for her, that was the norm and she grew up without any sense of a support network from her family. She started having sex …show more content…
She was clearly mentally ill and needed help; her illness disrupted her ways of thinking and her mood regulation. In the Supreme Court case Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986), it states that executing the insane is unconstitutional, and that they only can be executed, if their mental competency is restored. In the Aileen case, she was clinically insane and mentally unstable. According to the article in the New York Times, “ The Supreme Court in 1986 stated that it is unconstitutional to execute someone who lacks the ability to comprehend the nature of the penalty”. In 2007, the court clarified that a prisoner’s awareness of the states rationale for an execution is not the same as a rational understanding of it” and that “ the evidence of psychological dysfunction may result in a fundamental failure to appreciate the connection between her crimes and her execution”. Aileen was guilty but definitely should not have been