Attorneys for Andre Thomas, who was convicted of killing his estranged wife, 4-year-old son and her 13-month-old daughter, say he’s not competent enough to understand the reasoning for his execution. A Texas death row inmate who gouged out his own eyes while jailed for killing his estranged wife, his 4-year-old son and her 13-month-old daughter — and excising the children’s hearts — has been granted a delayed execution so the state can determine in court whether he’s competent enough to be put to death.
Andre Thomas, 39, was scheduled to die by lethal injection on April 5. But on Tuesday, State District Judge Jim Fallon issued an order withdrawing his execution date, according to the Associated Press.
Maurie Levin, Thomas’ attorney, wrote in a statement that the decision will give the defense “the time necessary to make the threshold showing that [Thomas’] lifelong, profound mental illness, characterized by fixed auditory and visual hallucinations, distorts everything he says, thinks, and does and he is not competent for execution.”
Thomas was transferred to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Jester IV unit, which houses inmates with mental health problems, after gouging his second eye out in 2009 and eating it, purportedly to ensure the federal government wouldn’t monitor his thoughts, according to reporting at the time by the The News-Star.
Although the Supreme Court does not prohibit executions of the mentally ill, it does forbid the state-sanctioned killing of the intellectually disabled. Thomas’ attorneys now have until July 5 to file a motion arguing that Thomas meets this standard, according to the Associated Press.
“We are confident that when we present the evidence of Mr. Thomas’s incompetence, the court will agree that executing him would violate the Constitution,” Levin wrote in his statement. “Guiding this blind psychotic man to the gurney for execution offends our sense of humanity and serves no legitimate purpose.”
The episodes of self-harm rendered Thomas entirely blind. The diagnosed schizophrenic pulled out his right eye while awaiting trial, five days after fatally stabbing Laura Christine Boren, 20, their 4-year-old son Andre Lee and Boren’s toddler, Leyha Marie Hughes.
Upon turning himself in to the Sherman Police Department after the 2004 murders, he claimed that God instructed him to carry out the killings. Obsessed with the Book of Revelation, he was convinced that Boren was Jezebel and that his young son was the Antichrist, according to reporting by the Huffington Post.
