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CASE NO. SC79484
AILEEN WUORNOS
by Next Friend - Florida Support
- Director Sissel Egeland
EMERGENCY PETITION
Petitioner, CAPITAL CASE
EXECUTION SCHEDULED
vs. FOR OCTOBER 9, 2002
AT 9:30 A.M.
STATE OF FLORIDA,
MICHAEL W. MOORE,
Secretary, Florida Department
of Corrections,
and
Bradley D. Carter, Warden,
Florida State Prison,
________________________________________________________________________
MOTION FOR A STAY OF EXECUTION
________________________________________________________________________
COMES NOW, FLORIDA SUPPORT by Director Sissel Egeland,
and files this Motion for Stay of Execution,
filed on October 4, 2002.
On October 4, 2002, on behalf
of Aileen Wuornos, next friend Florida Support
by Director Sissel Egeland
requests that this court grant an indefinite stay
of execution to give Next Friend
time and possibility to challenge the
conclusion that Aileen Wuornos
is competent and has voluntarily dismissed
her appeals. Petitioner asks
The Court for a Stay of Execution which would
be of sufficient length in
which to prepare the legal issues in support of
Petitioner's claims of Aileen
Wuornos incompetency. Also requested is the
appointment of Special Counsel
who can assist Next Friend in order to get
ethical, thorough and professional
psychiatric evaluation and observation of
Aileens borderline psychosis
Florida Support is a watch
and support project for Florida death row
inmates, which gives support
to the Florida death row inmates, their victims
and the families and friends
of the inmates.
Florida Support has close
contact with most of the Florida death row inmates
and has a responsibility to
alert Florida courts and officials when ethics
related to serious life and
death issues are at stake for individual
clients.
Florida Support has a special
concern for the innocents and for the insane
on Florida`s death row.
As long as no close family
has stepped forward to help act on her behalf to
secure borderline psychotic
Aileen legal and psychiatric help in this
traumatic situation, Florida
Support has no other options than to ask the
Florida Supreme Court to be
accepted as "Next Friend" for Aileen Wuornos
Aileeen has been found sane
according to an order by Governor Jeb Bush after
3 psychiatrists
talked with her collectively
for 30 minutes
We question the procedures and methods used to find Aileen sane.
A thirty minute interview
with the subject is not a mental evaluation on
which to decide life or death
issues.
The situation described below
( Associated Press October 4, 2002 ) cannot be
compared with what is professionally
defined to be a psychiatric mental
examination.
When a life is at stake,
this becomes even worse.
"Gov. Jeb Bush ordered a mental exam, which took place last week.
Tanner, who watched the exam,
said she was agitated with both Singhal and
Bush for putting her through
another mental evaluation. He said Wuornos was
cognizant and lucid during
the 30-minute interview.
Aileen has a long history
of mental illness and she is diagnosed as being
borderline psychotic
She is a victim of serious
abuse in childhood and may have been raped before
the crime was committed
At her trial for the murder
of Richard Mallory, Wournos testified that she
shot him only after he attempted
to violently rape her. Police found
"nothing dirty" on the victim
and concluded that there was nothing to
substantiate the defendant's
tale of sexual assault. Had they simply run
Mallory's name through the
FBI's computer network, they would have known he
served a decade behind bars
for violent rape years before.
Wournos suffered a tragic,
abusive upbringing, which resulted in a
borderline personality disorders.
Her mother abandoned her as an infant, and
her father served time in mental
hospitals in several states as a deranged
child molester. Eventually,
her father, like her grandfather, committed
suicide, and her grandmother
died of liver failure from alcoholism. Wournos
suffered from physical abuse
as a child, and later told police she had sex
with her brother at a very
early age. During both the trial and the appeal,
the court declined to find
the statutory factor of extreme emotional
disturbance.
Defense lawyer Billy Nolas
is informing the public October 4, 2002 about his
concern ( Associated
Press)
Billy Nolas, who represented
Wuornos in that trial, said she suffers from
borderline personality disorder
as a result of neglect and sexual abuse as a
child.
"She is the most disturbed
individual I have represented," said Nolas, who
now practices law in Philadelphia.
"As she has gotten older
and older, she has gotten worse and worse," said
Nolas, who believes Wuornos
is too mentally ill to comprehend what dropping
her appeals and seeking death
will mean.
"She is a like a kid," Nolas
said, adding that she pouts and stomps around
and doesn't want to deal with
difficult situations.
Nolas, who refers to Wuornos
as "Lee," said he believes Mallory raped
Wuornos and that pushed her
over the edge. Information on Mallory's prior
history of sexual assault was
withheld from defense attorneys, he said
"Before that, she had no history of physical violence," Nolas said.
When she was convicted on
Jan. 27, 1992, she shouted at the jury, "I'm
innocent. I was raped! I hope
you get raped! Scumbags of America!"
Two days later the jury recommended
the death penalty, and the judge
sentenced her the next day
to die.
This observation from defense
lawyer Billy Nolas was formed through years of
personal knowledge and experience
with Aileen.
In a letter to the Florida
Supreme Court dated September 17, 2002
Defense lawyer Raag Singhal
informs the Florida Supreme Court that :
"Based upon the totality of
my contacts with Ms. Wuornos, I have grave
doubts about her mental condition
and specifically whether she is competent
to be executed."
These observations were also
made by lawyer Singhal over an extended period
of time, not 30 minutes.
And more :
"I am writing to simply ask
that Ms. Wuornos be evaluated by a team of
Court-ordered psychologists
prior to any further proceedings in her cases."
And more to focus from Singhal`s letter :
"In Court and at the jail,
she exhibits bizarre behavior, laughing and
crying at inappropriate times
and obsessing on points having no importance
to her cases. The specific
claims she raises in her twenty-three page
supplemental filing to Judge
Backrnan on July 12,2002
if untrue, appear to be evidence of delusional behaviour"
And more:
"I am not an expert in psychology
or psychiatry, but I write this letter
because I am
firmly convinced of Ms. Wuomos'
mental illness."
The real questions in Aileens accusations about the prison conditions are
if they are DELUSIONAL or TRUE
In the lawsuit he's handling
for Wuornos, she accuses prison guards of
trying to harass her "to death"
and drive her to suicide. In her 25-page
handwritten court filing, Wuornos
has accused the prison staff of tainting
her food, spitting on it and
serving her potatoes cooked in dirt.
The state Department of Corrections has rejected her allegations.
Wuornos, who calls herself
a model prisoner, complained about eight
sergeants and officers assigned
to the women's death row unit at the Broward
Correctional Institution after
she dropped her death appeals.
She accused the prison staff
of waging psychological and physical warfare
against her and wants the eight
officers to be transferred "until my X," her
shorthand for execution. She
also wants the old staff returned.
A person with a borderline
psychosis is not continuously openly psychotic,
but may be psychotic in, for
her, special traumatic situations.
In a 30 minutes interview
with many people attending, there is no chance
that the psychiatrists may
be able to find her psychotic dilemmas.
Aileen may be able to cognitively
repeat the in-learned sentences she knows
the psychiatrists want, to
be able to find her sane, without exposing the
deeper layer of emotional psychotic
chaos underneath this superficial
situation.
The situation offered for
Aileeen to decide her competency issues are below
any international standard
of decency and is contra to all knowledge about
diagnostics in modern psychiatry
related to borderline patients.
What has been observed during
these 30 minutes of conversation has NOTHING
to do with evaluation of sanity
or insanity and competency or incompetency.
This is only a formal "show"
to justify that she has been exposed to three
psychiatry names, so that she
can formally be allowed to be executed.
If we also should find that
she was medicated under this "examination", the
diagnosis has no meaning at
all.
The diagnosis made in this situation CANNOT be trusted.
This court should be competent
and able to draw the ethical guidelines for
the execution of the alleged
insane in Florida.
(From AP news October 2, 2002)
"Singhal said Wednesday he
was not surprised at the psychiatrists' findings
but was disappointed Wuornos
is set to be executed. He said he wished the
evaluations had been "a whole
movie and not just a snapshot," and that he
still has the same concerns
about Wuornos' mental competence."
The same three psychiatrists
by the same superficial methods declared
recently that Rigoberto Sanchez-Velasco
understood the relationship between
his killing of a girl and his
guilt for this crime and understanding why he
was given the death penalty
for this murder.
He was found competent to
be executed and sane by the same "expert" team,
using this definition of his
cognitive understanding and his competency.
They even declared he had no major mental illness.
One may wonder how much Rigoberto
Sanchez-Velasco really understood of his
relationship to this crime
and his death penalty, when his defense lawyer
Craig DeThomasis the next morning
presented the world with a handwritten
letter written by Rigoberto
the same night after this " mental snapshot",
telling us:
Police said Sanchez-Velasco
confessed to Kathy's murder after his arrest,
and he also admitted the killing
during his trial for the child's death. But
he denied it in a statement
issued after the execution by his lawyer.
"I did not commit the crime
for which I will die. It does not matter who
believes me and who won't believe
me," said the statement.
The statement was written
by Sanchez-Velasco during the night and handed to
a Roman Catholic priest who
was among his final death row visitors, said the
lawyer, Craig DeThomasis of
Gainesville.
"I don't know there is a
case to be made that that there was an innocent man
who is executed," the attorney
said.
The definition of "understanding"
by this three psychiatrist team is softly
said, questionable.
This mental exam or mental
snapshot is done shortly before Aileens 30
minutes SANE diagnosis is set.
We also question why this
" expert" team, carefully picked only by the
Governor`s favorites and to
the public still unoffical by which criteria
these individual psychiatrists
were chosen, has not included the new
information from Aileen Wuornos
defense lawyers - here defined as newly
discovered evidences of her
insanity.
And why was there never an
exchange of information between this team of
"experts" and the informants
of insanity observations both in the Wuornos
and Sanchez-Velascos cases
- informants that had important personal
knowledge and closeness to
the defendants over a time period, which extended
the 30 minutes snapshot.
Only then would any psychiatrist
be able to start on the work to find the
defendants sanity or insanity
and to conclude professionally over time on
the legal question of competency.
The ethical guidelines of
the AMA in capital cases leaves no doubt that the
ethical standards are seriously
violated in Florida in the case of Aileen
Wuornos.
The Declaration of ethical
standards for psychiatric practice of the World
Medical Association approved
in 1996 and amended in 2002 clearly states the
guidelines to be used for psychiatrists,
including the Americans and
including the Floridians. This
defines the question of professional
psychiatric independency and
the issues of conflict of interest.
"The psychiatrist, among
whose patients are some who are severely
incapacitated and incompetent
to reach an informal decision, should be
particularly careful of actions
that could lead to the death of those who
cannot protect themselves because
of their disability."
The real question is who
in Florida today is protecting Aileen Wuornos
against her illness?
The responsibility for this
life is now in the hands of each of the Florida
justices, even after the Governor
has given his own conclusion.
Florida Supreme Court has
a responsibility of its own to evaluate the
methods and situations used
to define competency in a life or death case and
in especially in a warrant
situation
Death is different.
Dixon v. State, 283 So.2d 1 (Fla. 1973).
The Florida Supreme Court
has a responsibility for securing that no insane
persons are being executed
in Florida.
Florida Support has a responsibility
to remind the justices of the Florida
Supreme Court about their responsibility
to ensure by professional and legal
standards that an insane person
is not executed.
The methods disclosed to the
public in this case are below any standard of
professional ethics and probably
also illegal related to international law.
Florida Support, by Director
Sissel Egeland, begs this Court to approve
Florida Support as Next Friend,
so that Aileen Wuornos is provided with
persons who have her best interest
in mind and who may be able to build up a
trust situation with Aileen,
necessary to make professional psychiatrists
able to complete an ethical
and thorough evaluation of her insanity based on
guidelines for psychiatrists
of today.
We also beg this court to
appoint special counsel to assist us to help
Aileen against her own
illness, that makes her hurtable
and unable to set up a defense against
those forces that wants her
to kill herself to be loved.
Aileen Wuornos must not and
cannot be executed in the present situation,
based on this unethical legal
and psychiatric quickstep.
We urge the Florida Supreme
Court to offer Aileen Wuornos the professional
help she is entitled to and
to show her the real respect she deserves and
not let her illness decide
her steps into death and finality.
We hereby ask the court to
stay the execution.
I HEREBY CERTIFY that a true copy of the foregoing motion has been
furnished by facsimile transmission
and U.S. Mail, first class postage
prepaid, to all counsel of
record this date ....
________________________
Sissel Egeland
PO Box 63
Glandorf, Ohio 45848
FAX 813-3544-809
copies provided to:
Aileen Wuornos
Florida State Prison
7819 N.W. 228th Street
Raiford, Florida 32026
Bradley D. Carter
Florida State Prison
7819 N.W. 228th Street
Raiford, Florida 32026
The Honorable R. Michael
Hutcheson
Circuit Court Judge
251 North Ridgewood Avenue
Room 204
Daytona Beach, Florida 32114
Chrief judge Robert K. Rouse
Sean Daly
Assistant State Attorney
Office of the State Attorney
The Justice Center
251 North Ridgewood Avenue
Daytona Beach, Fla. 32114-
7505
Scott A. Browne
Assistant Attorney General
Office of the Attorney General
Westwood Center, Suite 700
2002 North Lois Avenue
Tampa, Florida 33607
Defense Lawyer Raag Singhal,
Esquire
Law Offices of Kapla Singhal,
P.A.
1323 S.E. 4WAvenue
Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33316
Defense Lawyer Billy Nolas,
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania.
United Nation -
WHO
Director Gro Harlem Brundtland
The Director-General's Office
WHO, Geneva
Fax: (+41 22) 791 4858
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