For Amanda Wallace to spew profanity in a courtroom is not new. What was different Monday is that the judge fired back, telling Wallace that she lied during her trial and that her emotional outbursts were nothing more than an act.
In a hearing where Wallace’s mental condition will loom large, Wallace disrupted court proceedings by trying to walk out of the courtroom. In a holding cell, she tied a T-shirt around her neck and swallowed three buttons before being forced to cough them up.
Such actions–which usually would be defined as crazy–could help Wallace in this sentencing hearing, where a defendant’s history of mental illness can be used to soften a sentence. But it is not always that simple.
And, besides, the judge was not impressed.
“She is competent, and she knows exactly what she is doing,” said Circuit Judge Michael Bolan of Cook County, who must first determine if Wallace is eligible for the death penalty. Even if she is eligible, he still could sentence her to life without parole. She cannot receive a sentence of less than life.
Bolan will have to balance Wallace’s mental problems–she has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder–against the brutality of the way she murdered her 3-year-old son, Joseph, by hanging him with an electrical cord. Then he will have to decide which side of the scale holds more weight.
Through the decades and even the centuries, courts have struggled when dealing with defendants who claim some kind of mental disorder. The legal issues can be confusing, so much so that even the definition of “insanity” can change, depending upon the phase of criminal proceedings.
Ten years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot execute an insane person, saying such punishment would amount to the “barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance.”
The court defined insane Death Row prisoners as those who do not understand that they are about to be executed or why. It does not matter that the prisoners might have been sane when committing the crime that landed them on Death Row.
Indeed, the prisoner in the Supreme Court’s 1986 case had been sane when he killed a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police officer in 1974. But by the time his scheduled execution rolled around, he had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and was telling others that he had sent his family to another planet on a space ship to protect them.
Law experts say the Supreme Court’s bar to the execution of insane prisoners is so low, though, that it often is easy to clear. Even people suffering from intense mental disorders can know that they are about to die and why.
Last year, Alabama executed Varnall Weeks, a man who believed his execution would turn him into a tortoise that would rule the universe. An Alabama judge said Weeks was insane by the dictionary’s definition, but he upheld the execution anyway–ruling, in effect, that Weeks was not insane by the Supreme Court’s definition for Death Row inmates.
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In Wallace’s case, that definition will not apply unless, and until, she gets sentenced to death and actually faces execution.
Instead, under Illinois law, what matters at sentencing is whether the judge believes Wallace killed her son while “under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance.” If so, the judge must consider that a mitigating factor and weigh it against aggravating factors–for example, the crime’s brutality–in deciding whether Wallace should be sentenced to death.
Wallace did not claim insanity as a defense at her trial. If she had, she would have needed to show that she lacked the capacity to “appreciate the criminality” of her conduct or conform her conduct to the law’s requirements.
Nor did she plead guilty but mentally ill. That plea would have required proof that her judgment at the time of the murder had been impaired by “a substantial disorder of thought, mood, or behavior,” but that she still understood that her behavior was wrong.
Such a plea would not have automatically barred the death penalty. In 1988, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that even people found guilty but mentally ill could be sentenced to death.
As for people who are mentally retarded, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the late 1980s that they could be executed.
Wallace, 30, lived in mental institutions and foster homes from the age 7, when her mother turned her over to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
At Monday’s hearing, Wallace’s outburst overshadowed a day in which witnesses, including her mother, Bonnie, testified that Wallace has manipulated the system to her own gain, and that she has a history of harming others who upset her.
Wallace’s attorney, Jimmie Jones, asked Bolan to reject capital punishment in this case by finding that the Cook County state’s attorney’s office practices a double standard and seeks capital punishment against non-whites more than whites. Bolan denied the motion.
Flanked by her attorneys, Wallace sat quietly and childlike for most of the morning, resting her chin on her hands. But when Bolan recounted the details of the crime, Wallace rose, muttering that she did not want to listen anymore. She refused to return to her seat when Bolan ordered her to and peppered him with profanities while bailiffs tried to restrain her.
“I’m not listening anymore, you know you’re wrong,” she said to Bolan. “Do what . . . you want to do.”
Bolan, who has consistently accused Wallace of malingering, shot back: “You got up here and you lied through your teeth, Amanda. You told a B.S. story.”
Undaunted, Wallace kept going. “You’re not my God, you’re not nothing,” she told the judge. “Until you become black, don’t say anything to me.”
She said there is someone who can prove her innocence, but she cannot contact him.
Bolan called a recess as Wallace was removed from court. She did not return.
Deputies said she tried to kill herself in custody by choking herself with a T-shirt. She also tried swallowing three buttons from her blouse. Sheriff’s Deputy Juan Diaz said he grabbed Wallace by the throat and made her spit up the buttons.
Court was halted briefly again in the afternoon, when Wallace became ill while her mother was testifying. Paramedics were brought to Wallace’s holding cell, where she apparently suffered a seizure. Although an ambulance was on standby, a paramedic told Bolan that it was not necessary to take Wallace to the hospital.
“It seems like more of a psychological thing than anything else,” the paramedic said.