The U.S. Supreme Court, the Death Penalty, and PTSD

The U.S. Army's "suicide crisis" has brought needed attention to the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers.

As of November 16, 140 active duty soldiers and 71 non-active duty soldiers had killed themselves. The rise in both suicides and incidences of PTSD appear to be linked.

On November 30, the Supreme Court of the United States gave hope to a Korean war veteran sentenced to death in Florida. George Porter returned from Korea a traumatized and changed man, the Court said in its opinion. He suffered from PTSD as a result of his battle experience, yet his lawyers never brought it to the attention of the jury at trial in 1988.

As a result, the court held, the representation provided Porter fell below minimum Constitutional standards. The justices seemed to say that if members of the jury had been informed of his service in combat and resultant trauma, they might have spared his life.

The Washington Post reported that the justices of the Supreme Court were "strikingly sympathetic" to Porter, who shot his former girlfriend and her new boyfriend 13 years ago.

The justices highlighted Porter's PTSD, saying, "Our nation has a long history of according leniency to veterans in recognition of their service, especially for those who fought on the front lines as Porter did. Moreover, the relevance of Porter's extensive combat experience is not only that he served honorably under extreme hardship and gruesome conditions, but also that the jury might find mitigating the intense stress and mental and emotional toll that combat took on Porter."

TheSupreme Court cast no doubt on his guilt, but sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times said that "the most notable feature" of the opinion "was the sympathy that all nine justices displayed for a man who, in the fullness of his adulthood and after promising a friend that she would soon be reading about him in the newspaper, stole another friend's gun and shot two people to death in cold blood." Opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/linda-greenhouse/

The Court seemed to go out of its way to show that it takes PTSD seriously. What do you think?

(Porter v. McCollum)