Inmate had appealed on grounds that he was diagnosed as severely mentally impaired

The state of Missouri executed its oldest death row inmate on Tuesday – a man who was mentally impaired from a work accident that removed a large portion of his brain – after his final appeals failed at the US supreme court.

The execution of Cecil Clayton, 74, was delayed for several hours, while the supreme court weighed appeals from Clayton’s defense attorneys.

Lawyers acting for Clayton had called on the nation’s highest court to intervene and stay the execution. In a petition to the nine justices, they argued that it would be unconstitutional to execute the prisoner because under a series of rulings in recent years the supreme court has banned judicial killings of insane and intellectually disabled people.



Clayton lost about a fifth of his frontal lobe in 1972 when a splinter from a log he was working on in a sawmill in Purdy, Missouri, dislodged and slammed into his skull. The damage has had a long-term impact on his character and behavior, with a succession of medical experts chronicling problems ranging from uncontrolled rage to hallucinations and depression.

The frontal lobe has an important function in controlling impulse and emotion.

In 1996 Clayton murdered a police officer, Christopher Castetter, who was called to a house where Clayton had broken in. There was no dispute about his guilt, though there was intense debate about whether he should have been protected from the gurney.

Elizabeth Unger Carlyle, attorney for Cecil Clayton, said of the supreme court decision:

Cecil Clayton had – literally – a hole in his head. Executing him without a hearing to determine his competency violated the constitution, Missouri law and basic human dignity. Mr Clayton was not a ‘criminal’ before the sawmill accident that lodged part of his skull into his brain and required 20% of his frontal lobe to be removed. He was happily married, raising a family and working hard at his logging business. Medical experts who examined 74-year-old Mr. Clayton said he couldn’t care for himself, tried but couldn’t follow simple instructions, and was intellectually disabled with an IQ of 71. He suffered from severe mental illness and dementia related to his age and multiple brain injuries. The world will not be a safer place because Mr Clayton has been executed.

In 2002 the US supreme court ruled in Atkins v Virginia that it was unconstitutional to put to death an intellectually disabled person (previously known as mental retardation) under the eighth amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Last year that protection was strengthened in Hall v Florida which obligated states to consider several indicators of intellectual disability, not just an IQ cut-off score.