Forgivable insanity

For students, Friday, May 4 will be a day of jubilation. Here in Bloomington the last day of final exams rings in the summer vacation with festivities that rival the madness of Little 500 just two weeks before. With thoughts turned to warm beaches and cold daiquiris it will be easy to ignore the unconscionable execution of David Leon Woods.\nThe 42-year-old man from DeKalb County was convicted for the 1984 murder of Juan Placencia, a friend of Woods’ mother in Garret, Ind. Gregory Sloan and Patrick Sweet accompanied Woods, who was 19 at the time, to Placencia’s apartment with the intention of stealing the television. When Placencia, 77, opened the door Woods stabbed him in the neck, face and torso several times. Though his fellow assailants were sent to prison, only Woods has spent the last 22 years in death’s shadow, a cruel insult that ends in unusually pitiless injury.\nProponents of capital punishment see his execution as a fitting end to a brutal killer, but they conveniently disregard the circumstances that drove Woods to commit the crime. According to Amnesty International, Woods exhibits clear signs of mental retardation and brain damage stemming from years of abuse and neglect. In 2005 the U.S. Court of Appeals acknowledged Woods’ troubled childhood, noting Woods’ mother and several boyfriends “took sadistic pleasure in physically abusing Woods and his siblings.” At one point she offered her 13- and 11-year-old daughters to a local motorcycle gang that she was housing. The court papers even describe how Woods’ mother chained the refrigerator shut and would only feed her children as a reward for stealing.\nWoods was eventually moved into foster care, but continued to suffer from depression and violent mood swings, at one point taking a knife to his arms and stomach. None of this, however, was of any consequence to the Indiana Supreme Court, which rejected a March 2007 mental retardation plea that would have rendered Woods’ execution unconstitutional.\nThe accused has very little time and very few options. Today Woods is being interviewed by the Indiana Parole Board, which will vote to grant clemency after a public hearing in Indianapolis Monday. The board’s recommendation will then go to Gov. Mitch Daniels, who will decide Woods’ fate.\nIf Gov. Daniels has any shred of humanity, he will delay David Woods’ execution until the state’s capital penal code can be reformed in accordance with the Indiana Death Penalty Assessment Report by the American Bar Association. The report, which recommends a temporary moratorium on capital punishment, argues, “Jurisdictions should bar the execution of individuals who have mental retardation” because Indiana law fails to create a base-standard of insanity, or to protect the insane from wrongful execution.\nIn the wake of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech it seems easy to categorically condemn violently disturbed individuals. We have to be careful though, not to let our anger manifest itself as a lethal injection. Even as victims, we must learn to hate the disease, not the sufferer.