A March 9, 2026, competency hearing for Andre Thomas, a death-sentenced prisoner in Texas, has been postponed to an unspecified date because of concerns that Mr. Thomas is too mentally ill to be transported to his competency hearing and he could not be re-examined by the State’s expert. Mr. Thomas was scheduled to be executed in April 2023; however, his execution date was withdrawn in March 2023, citing concerns with his severe mental illness (SMI) and competency to face execution.
Dr. Joseph V. Penn, the Director of Mental Health Services at the University of Texas Medical Branch, who manages care for the most mentally ill prisoners held at the Wayne Scott Unit where Mr. Thomas is housed, penned a letter filed with the 15th Judicial District of Grayson County noting “Mr. Thomas is one of the most treatment resistant/refractory, and complicated patients [he has] evaluated, consulted on, or treated.” He further explains in his letter thatWayne Scott behavioral health staff and Mr. Thomas’ treatment team have raised several concerns with transporting him more than five and a half hours for his hearing to a small county jail that may not be equipped to handle his medical needs.
With an extensive history of schizoaffective disorder, including hallucinations and paranoid delusion, Mr. Thomas requires a strictly monitored medication regimen. “[D]espite his current antipsychotic and other psychotropic medication treatment regimen, he still has grandiose and paranoid delusions. He continues to intermittently struggle with psychotic symptoms, and he remains clinically fragile and at risk to decompensate,” wrote Dr. Penn. Because of this,members of Mr. Thomas’ treatment team have “serious concerns regarding the imminent risks of additional serious self-harm, harm to self and others, impulsivity, and the risks of psychotic deterioration” posed by long-term transportation. Wayne Scott staff “have also raised concerns regarding the stressors of being moved to a new and unfamiliar location with unknown new staff and a new physical plant” noting that “sounds and other sensory experiences (due to being legally blind) that he is not familiar with could certainly exacerbate his fragile psychotic illness.”
In a lengthy July 2024 evaluation of Mr. Thomas, Dr. George Corvin, a court-appointed psychiatrist, reviewed extensive records related to his mental health and legal records and found “compelling” evidence that Mr. Thomas is not competent to be executed under legal standards. Ford v. Wainwright (1986) held the Eighth Amendment bars the execution of the insane and reiterated that defendants are entitled to a competency evaluation and hearing to assess the question of their competency. A later ruling in Panetti v. Quarterman (2007) established that a prisoner must have a “rational understanding” of the state’s reason for execution and the connection between their crime and punishment. “Mr. Thomas is suffering from active psychotic symptoms of a primary psychotic disorder (Schizophrenia), and [] the nature of these symptoms directly impacts his ability to rationally comprehend his legal situation, and in particular, leave him unable to rationally understand not only his proposed execution, but the reality of his execution. As such, the undersigned views him as lacking the competency to be executed,” wrote Dr. Corvin.
According to Dr. Corvin’s evaluation, Mr. Thomas suffers from a number of serious delusions. Dr. Corvin notes that while Mr. Thomas can articulate the government’s stated reason for his execution, he does not believe that is the real reason. Mr. Thomas also believes that government attempts to execute him would not succeed. Dr. Corvin wrote “Mr. Thomas delusionally believes that the government would most likely be unsuccessful if they were to try to execute him, such that if his heart were to stop, it would immediately start again, he would get up off the gurney in a different form.” Dr. Corvin has also noted that Mr. Thomas “believes his heartbeat is connected to nuclear warhead codes such that if his heart were to stop beating even temporarily, the nuclear warhead would explode triggering the End Days.”
Mr. Thomas was convicted and sentenced to death in 2005 for the murder of his estranged wife, their son, and his wife’s daughter. Since childhood, Mr. Thomas has suffered from schizophrenia. He began hearing voices and drinking alcohol at age 9 and first attempted suicide at age 10. He has a long family history of mental illness and in 2004, two days before the murders, Mr. Thomas attempted suicide and was taken to the hospital, where a doctor determined he was paranoid, experiencing hallucinations, and “really mentally ill.” In the three weeks leading up the murders, Mr. Thomas attempted suicide a total of three times. Left unsupervised, Mr. Thomas walked out of the hospital; the hospital issued an emergency detention order, which directed law enforcement to apprehend Mr. Thomas. Law enforcement did not act on this directive.
Driven by religious delusions and hallucinations, Mr. Thomas killed his wife and her two children and again attempted to take his own life by stabbing himself in the chest. He turned himself into police when he realized he was not dying. Less than a week after the murders, while in jail, Mr. Thomas gouged out his right eye, following the literal dictates of Mathew 5:29. Years later, while on death row, Mr. Thomas would gouge out and eat his left eye whole because he did not want the government to read his thoughts through his eye.
When Mr. Thomas was sentenced to death in 2005, his jury did not hear his long history of mental illness and efforts to get help, including the three suicide attempts in the weeks leading up to the crime, nor did they hear about the detention order from the hospital. After ripping out his right eye, Mr. Thomas was declared incompetent to stand trial. Less than two months later, doctors declared him competent and he was returned to Grayson County for trial. His defense attorneys did not raise the question of his competence again before the start of trial. Mr. Thomas pleaded guilty by reason of insanity and two court-appointed doctors found that Mr. Thomas was a paranoid schizophrenic, and psychotic when he carried out the crime. Prosecutors agreed with this finding, but argued his psychosis was voluntarily induced before the killings by ingesting cough medicine. Mr. Thomas’ defense counsel did not present evidence of his longstanding auditory and visual hallucinations, allowing the state’s argument to prevail.
Mr. Thomas’ April 2023 execution date had been set just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to his conviction based on evidence of jurors’ racial bias. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the Court’s denial of review. Justice Sotomayor wrote in the dissent that courts must “safeguard the fairness of criminal trials by ensuring that jurors do not harbor, or at the very least could put aside, racially biased sentiments.” The jury that convicted Mr. Thomas, a Black man, was all-white and three jurors openly expressed racial bias on their jury questionnaires, stating their disagreement with interracial marriage and children — facts directly pertinent to Mr. Thomas and the crime in question. Mr. Thomas’ trial counsel did not challenge the inclusion of these jurors and did not object to the prosecutor’s use of racially inflammatory comments. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “The errors in this case render Thomas’ death sentence not only unreliable, but unconstitutional.”