Varnall Weeks was executed by the State of Alabama for the murder of Mark Batts
According to court documents Varnall Weeks would rob and murder college student Mark Batts. Weeks would flee the scene and was involved in a shootout with police where an Officer was badly injured
Varnall Weeks would be convicted and sentenced to death
Varnall Weeks would be executed via the electric chair on May 12 1995
Varnall Weeks Case
Varnall Weeks, a convicted killer described by psychiatric experts as a paranoid schizophrenic who believed he would come back to life as a giant flying tortoise that would rule the world, was put to death this morning in Alabama’s electric chair.
The 43-year-old Mr. Weeks, who robbed and murdered a college student in 1981, was executed at 12:09 A.M. at the state prison in Atmore, Ala., over the protests of human rights advocates.
Mr. Weeks once described himself to a judge as God and on another occasion sat in a courtroom with a domino tied to his head. Back in the 1970’s he spent six months in a mental hospital. And he was found by prosecution and defense experts alike to be mentally ill.
But while allowing that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, Alabama courts ruled that he was sane enough to execute. And on Thursday the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in 1986 that execution of a mentally incompetent convict is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, unanimously rejected his request for a stay. The effect was to let stand lower court findings that although Mr. Weeks was mentally ill, he was not mentally incompetent, since, the courts held, he understood that he had been convicted of a crime and that this was why he had been sentenced to die
But Stephen B. Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, in Atlanta, said Mr. Weeks had clearly been unaware of what went on around him in courtrooms.
“He babbled,” Mr. Bright said. “He flitted from one idea to another. An average person does not sit in court with a domino tied to his head with a string.”
Mr. Weeks was put to death for robbing and murdering Mark Anthony Batts, 24, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., in 1981, when Mr. Batts was studying veterinary science at Tuskegee Institute. Mr. Weeks fled the scene but was arrested in Ohio after a gun battle in which one police officer was badly wounded.
His unusual behavior in the years since included standing naked in his prison cell and screaming at the walls. He also once told a judge that he had heard the voice of God in thunder and that he welcomed death as an adventure in which he would rule all humankind as a godlike tortoise. Psychiatrists said he lived in a maze of delusions.
“My brother is insane, and he’s been insane ever since childhood,” Lester Weeks told The Associated Press. “What is this country coming to? Are we going back to the witching days when we kill and burn people for being insane?
Mr. Bright said Mr. Weeks had been sacrificed to the nation’s get-tough-on-crime posture. In addition, he pointed out that of the 12 people executed in Alabama since the state resumed the death penalty in 1983, eight, including Mr. Weeks, were black. “That tells you something isn’t right,” he said.
But David Dearden, the police officer who was badly wounded in the Ohio shootout, and who spent 30 days in a hospital as a result, told The Associated Press that he had no compunction about Mr. Weeks’s execution.
“Fry him,” Mr. Dearden said
