Competency to be executed; definition
Applied in 6 court decisions — leading case Ford v. Wainwright (1986)
Most recently applied in 671 F. Supp. 2d 840 - Billiot v. Epps (November 2009)
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
A. A person who is sentenced to death shall not be executed as long as he is mentally incompetent to be executed.
B. As used in this article, "mentally incompetent to be executed" means that due to a mental disease or defect a person who is sentenced to death is presently unaware that he is to be punished for the crime of murder or that he is unaware that the impending punishment for that crime is death.
Official source: Arizona State Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain Arizona statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.