Billy Ray Irick was just 6 years old the first time someone raised questions about his mental health. It was March 1965, when he was in the first grade. His school’s principal referred him to the Knoxville Mental Health Center, requesting a mental evaluation to determine, according to court documents, “whether Billy’s extreme behavioral problems and unmanageability in school were the result of emotional problems or whether Billy suffered from some form of ‘organic brain damage.’ ”
A clinical social worker at the center performed an assessment, noting that the young boy “apparently mistreats animals” and that he had “for a couple of years been telling people outside the home that his mother mistreats him, that she ties him up with a rope and beats him.” Later, a psychologist at the center who interviewed Irick concluded that he was most likely “suffering from a severe neurotic anxiety reaction with a possibility of mild organic brain damage.” The young boy, the psychologist noted, tended “to fear his own impulses.”
Nearly seven years after those evaluations, a then-13-year-old Irick was living at the Church of God Home for Children in Sevierville, Tenn. — a former orphanage that provided care for abused and emotionally disturbed children. His parents, whose mental and emotional stability had also been questioned, rarely visited him between the ages of 8 and 13. But in June 1972, according to testimony included in court documents, the facility arranged for Irick to visit his parents at home.
According to court documents, the visit did not go well: “During the visit, Billy used an axe to destroy the family television set, clubbed flowers in the flower bed, and, in a very disturbing incident, used a razor to cut up the pajamas that his younger sister was wearing as she slept. The razor was later found in his sister’s bed.”
Fourteen years later, in August 1986, Irick was convicted of the rape and murder of 7-year-old Paula Dyer. Last month, for the third time in four years, the state of Tennessee scheduled his death. Two other executions scheduled by the state Supreme Court will almost certainly be delayed because the men involved have yet to exhaust their appeals, but Irick — who is now 59 and has been on death row for more than 30 years — has fewer options remaining to keep him off the gurney.
Irick is one of five inmates whose attorneys are planning to challenge the state’s new lethal injection protocol, citing emails that show the state has been warned that a new cocktail of drugs could cause pain and suffering.
But there’s another question that could be raised between now and Aug. 9, 2018, when Tennessee intends to put Irick to death: Is he fit for execution? That combination of words, “fit for execution,” like so many in the lexicon of the death penalty, twists the English language into a peculiar shape. But it is crucial.
In the 1986 case of Ford v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing an “insane” inmate runs afoul of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. How to determine whether a condemned inmate is insane, however, was left a mostly open question. Writing on Ford v. Wainwright, Justice Lewis F. Powell opined that it would be unconstitutional to execute an inmate who is “unaware of the punishment they are about to suffer and why they are to suffer it,” and that is the standard that has been used in many lower courts.
As of this writing, there is not a pending challenge to Irick’s competency for execution, and his attorney, Gene Shiles, declined to comment for this story. But court filings from years past, including one challenging the trial court’s decision that Irick was fit for execution, detail years of mental health issues suffered by Irick, including some that were never heard by a jury and have been largely blocked from full consideration by a court. They include anecdotes like those above and other information that could shed light on his state of mind at the time of the horrific crime for which he was sentenced to death.
In 1999, as attorneys appealed Irick’s case in federal court, an investigator traveled to Knoxville to speak to potential witnesses. Surprisingly, the investigator discovered that no one had interviewed members of Paula Dyer’s stepfamily, with whom Irick had been living in the weeks before her murder. The investigator learned that “just days or weeks before Paula Dyer’s death,” Irick, wielding a machete, had chased a school-age girl down a Knoxville public street in broad daylight “with the explanation that he ‘didn’t like her looks.’ ” Ramsey and Linda Jeffers — the parents of Dyer’s stepfather, Kenny Jeffers — and their daughter Cathy signed affidavits attesting that Irick had been “talking with the devil,” “hearing voices” and “taking instructions from the devil.” Cathy Jeffers, the court document says, testified that Irick had told her “the only person that tells me what to do is the voice” and that on one evening, as paraphrased in the court filing, he’d been “frantic that the police would enter the home and kill them with chainsaws.”
After reviewing the Jefferses’ affidavits, Dr. Clifton Tennison — the psychologist who performed the initial mental health examination before Irick’s original trial — stated in an affidavit that he no longer had confidence in his initial evaluation, which had been used to argue against an insanity defense.
“The information contained within the attached affidavits raises a serious and troubling issue of whether Mr. Irick was psychotic on the date of the offense and at any previous and subsequent time,” he wrote.
Two more psychologists reviewed the affidavits and other records related to Irick’s mental health and concluded that he “suffered at the very least from a dissociative disorder, and probably was schizophrenic or intermittently psychotic.”
In a brief filed in 2010, Irick’s attorneys argued that he “was experiencing a psychotic episode with hallucinations and/or delusions and that he has no memory of the offenses themselves or his role in them.” Further, they contended that Irick did not, and could not, “have a rational understanding of his pending execution because he has no memory of the offenses, does not believe that he committed them, and has the emotional and social functioning of a child.”
Their efforts were blocked on procedural grounds, and the state Supreme Court affirmed the trial court’s judgment that Irick was “competent to be executed.”
