On July 6th the state of Virginia executed William Morva for the 2006 murders of a sheriff’s deputy and a hospital security guard. Morva had been serving time in a county jail for an attempted armed robbery, that never took place, and premeditated his escape from jail.
You may not have heard about this case though because it was an especially tough one; Morva suffered from severe mental illness and yet the jury on his case was never told that he was unable to separate “delusion from reality.” The state knew though and pushed for the death penalty anyway.
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They would go on to put him to death by lethal injection using the same sedative that has a reputation for leaving inmates screaming in agony during their final moments,1 and all without a full public witness (a recent change to Virginia’s execution protocol says that media members and attorneys only see the inmate after the IV is inserted). From start to finish, in my humble opinion, it was a mess.
A polite death
Over the last decade, there’s been a huge shortfall of execution drugs. However, in order to keep things on schedule, a handful of states have tried a new cocktail that includes midazolam, a common sedative that’s supposed to knock people out so they die painlessly. But here’s the rub, not only was the drug never intended to be used in executions but no one can prove that the drug actually “blocks the pain of those procedures or simply renders the inmate paralyzed and unable to show signs of suffering”:2 3
- In January 2014, an Ohio man who was given the drug “struggled and gasped” for longer than was typical.
- An inmate in Oklahoma who received an injection of a cocktail including midazolam in April of that year “blew” a vein and suffered such a brutal death that curtains had to be closed for witnesses.
- That same July, an Arizona prisoner who was given midazolam took almost two hours to die, even though lethal injection normally takes around 15 minutes.
“To insist that the use of midazolam is ‘humane’ despite not knowing whether the drug truly anesthetizes the condemned or merely renders them unable to indicate that they’re being tortured to death is a good indication that for death penalty supporters, ‘humaneness’ is not about the experience of the people we execute but the experience of those who witness and participate in executions.
The methods of execution that would cause the least amount of pain and suffering for the condemned– such as decapitation or firing squad — are dismissed as barbaric because they actually look like executions, and that can be traumatic for witnesses and executioners. Instead, nearly all states employ a method that could easily be mistaken for a medical procedure. It sanitizes the event for the living. Never mind that it may well subject the executed to unimaginable pain.” 4
The case deserved more attention than it got because of just how deeply delusional Morva was. Three mental health professionals evaluated Morva at trial and found signs of mental illness but believed that he didn’t suffer from anything that would have prevented him from committing the acts “consciously and fully understanding their consequences.” However, it appears that those evaluations were based on incomplete reviews of Morva’s history. In fact, all one would need to do would be to take a look at his past or interview his friends and family and a painful childhood and adulthood would emerge which showed him spiraling into delusional behavior long before he committed his crimes.
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According to good friends, Morva began acting strangely in his late teens. There’s evidence that Morva was psychologically abused by his father, too (he made him wear dresses to school to “toughen” him up). In college he would began a bizarre diet of pine cones, raw meat, and cheese. His first arrest came after he was found on the floor, pants-less, in a Virginia Tech campus bathroom.5 When his father died, he showed up to the funeral barefoot. He often went barefoot (even in the winter), sometimes slept in the woods and told people he had special powers and was “in training to fight in the wild on behalf of Native Americans.” 6 And all BEFORE he had committed any serious crime. Yet the jurors who sentenced Morva to die heard almost none of those truths.
“Morva’s arrest for attempted armed robbery came in 2005, when he and another man tried to rob a convenience store, apparently due to Morva’s delusional belief that his mother was destitute after his father’s death. The effort was laughably inept. The men gave up on the heist when they couldn’t get the door open. Morva didn’t steal a single item and didn’t point his gun at anyone.
Morva was then kept in a crowded county jail for more than a year. His mental illness went diagnosed and untreated. As one of Morva’s friends told Segura, ‘We were like, ‘Look, Will is not mentally stable . . . If you guys throw him in the middle of this institution, it’s like a time bomb.’ And it was. After a year in jail, Morva attempted escape, which resulted in the two murders for which he was executed.” 7
In Virginia, the decision to commute a death sentence rests solely with the governor, which automatically makes the decision a political one. 8And yet, the decision to execute someone shouldn’t be political in ANY way. Even though, like in this case, a security guard and a police officer- two civil servants- were killed.
Our hearts go out to all the families involved. We are so sorry for each of the losses.
