(Houston) A clemency petition was filed Wednesday with the governor of Texas to spare a death row inmate who gouged out his eye and ate one.
Andre Thomas, 39, is due to receive a lethal injection on April 5 in the southern US state, nearly 20 years after killing and maiming his ex-wife, their four-year-old son and his ex-wife’s daughter, while 13 months old.
Without minimizing the horror of the drama, his lawyers believe that he suffers from mental disorders too serious to be executed. In a letter to Republican Governor Greg Abbott, they ask that his sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.
His crime is “heartbreaking”, but his mental illness, schizophrenia with episodes of hallucinations, is also “tragic”, they write. “Seeing this eyeless and psychotic man being led to his death would be a shameful sight,” they plead.
Five days after committing the triple murder, Andre Thomas tore out his right eye. After his death sentence, he had enucleated the second, and had ingested it, said his lawyer Maurie Levin, during a press conference.
“It goes without saying that a sane person would never do that,” she said, recalling that the Supreme Court has banned the execution of prisoners with mental illness who cannot understand the meaning of their sentence. .
According to her, Andre Thomas started hearing voices at the age of nine and first tried to kill himself at age 10. Two days before the crime, he had been hospitalized and a doctor had given an internment order which had not been followed up.
His condition has deteriorated since his arrest and he has been held for 15 years in a prison dedicated to inmates with mental illness.
The request for clemency is supported by 77 mental health specialists and around 100 religious leaders from several faiths.
Texas is one of the few US states that frequently imposes the death penalty. Three of the six executions carried out this year in the United States took place in Texas.