Execution Of Mentally Ill Man Set For Thursday: NAMI Urges Members To Ask Tennessee Governor For Mercy

The first mistake

During the trial, jurors were specifically told that Irick was not mentally ill. This was based on a single psychologist questioning him in jail – an interview that lasted less than an hour and didn’t include any detailed investigation into his past. It was only after Irick was sentenced to death that a new team of mitigation attorneys fully explored his childhood. Based on their probe, eight mental health professionals, some hired by the state and others by the defense, all agreed that Irick was and remains seriously mentally ill.

In addition, the psychologist, who originally testified that Irick was not mentally ill, flip-flopped and notified the court that after reviewing the new evidence, he was now confident that Irick was severely impaired when the crime happened.

Courts frequently refuse to allow new evidence to be admitted after a death sentence has been imposed. A thorough background check into Irick’s past should have happened when he was arrested.

Warning Signs That Went Unheeded

Those of you who want to read testimony about Irick’s past can find it here. For brevity, here’s a short-hand version by  STEVEN HALE, published in Nashville Scene. 

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.” 

So here we have a deeply troubled boy.

The second investigation concluded that Irick was an unwanted child, left in an orphanage because there were no mental health hospitals for children at the time. He was given Thorazine at age six. At age thirteen, as cited above, he was sent home for a visit and found hovering over his sister’s bed with a razor.

What happened next?

Irick was returned to the orphanage where he was later spotted standing over a sleeping girl’s bed with a knife in his hand. He ran away.

Two Terrifying Incidents – Yet No Treatment

When he turned fourteen, Irick was sent home.  There was no treatment plan. No outpatient care. Instead, he returned to a house where he was physically and emotionally abused, according to court records.

When he turned eighteen, he joined the Army. Little is known about what happened during this period or the two years after he left the service and wandered across the country.  A throw-away child, he remained a throw-away member of society.

A childhood friend, Kenneth Jeffers, invited Irick to live with him and his parents, Ramsey and Linda Jeffers. His friend was divorced but still had his daughter, Paula Dyer, living with him on occasion. In return for staying with the Jeffers, Irick was asked to babysit and care for the children in the house.

Back to Reporter Hale’s account:

In 1999 …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.”

Should his mental illness matter – legally?

In an Intercept article about the Irick case, Liliana Segura explained the legal precedents.