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US District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, DC, has imposed two injunctions this morning prohibiting the federal Bureau of Prisons from moving forward with the execution Wesley Ira Purkey. The Justice Department filed immediate appeals in both cases. A separate temporary stay was already in place from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Purkey, who is next on the list to be executed by the federal government after a nearly 20-year hiatus, may have a better chance of avoiding lethal injection because he suffers from dementia and so, his lawyers say, can no longer grasp why he is slated to die.

He was convicted of a 1998 kidnapping and killing, and had been scheduled for execution today at the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death Tuesday after late legal bids failed to prevent the first federal execution since 2003.

Purkey, 68, of Lansing, Kansas, would be the second, but his lawyers were still expected to press for a ruling from the supreme court on his competency.

This competency issue is a very strong issue on paper, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. The supreme court has halted executions on this issue in the past. At a minimum, the question of whether Purkey dies is going to go down to the last minute, report Michael Balsamo and Michael Tarm for the Associated Press.

The issue of Purkeys mental health arose in the run-up to his 2003 trial and when, after the verdict, jurors had to decide whether he should be put to death in the killing of 16-year-old Jennifer Long in Kansas City, Missouri.

Prosecutors alleged that he raped and stabbed her, dismembered her with a chainsaw, burned her, then dumped her ashes 200 miles (320 kilometers) away in a septic pond in Kansas. Purkey was separately convicted and sentenced to life in the beating death of 80-year-old Mary Ruth Bales, of Kansas City, Kansas.

But the legal questions of whether he was mentally fit to stand trial or to be sentenced to die are different from the question of whether he is mentally fit enough now, in the hours before his scheduled execution, to be put to death.

Purkey’s lawyers argue he clearly is not, saying in recent filings that he suffers from advancing Alzheimers disease.
He has long accepted responsibility for the crime that put him on death row, one of this lawyers, Rebecca Woodman, said. But as his dementia has progressed, he no longer has a rational understanding of why the government plans to execute him. Purkey believes his planned execution is part of a vast conspiracy involving his own attorneys.

While various legal issues in Purkey’s case have been hashed, rehashed and settled by courts over nearly two decades, the issue of mental fitness for execution can only be addressed once a date is set, according to Dunham, who also teaches law school courses on capital punishment. A date was only set last year.

In a landmark 1986 decision, the US supreme court ruled that the Constitution prohibits putting someone to death who lacks a reasonable understanding of why he is being executed. It involved the case of Alvin Ford, who was convicted of murder but whose mental health deteriorated behind bars to the point where, according to his lawyer, he believed he was pope.

The mother of the teen Purkey killed, Glenda Lamont, told the Kansas City Star last year she planned to attend the execution.

“I don’t want to say that I’m happy,” Lamont said. “At the same time, he is a crazy mad man that doesn’t deserve, in my opinion, to be breathing anymore.”