Had Larry Robison lived in any other state but Texas, his story might have ended much differently. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic at 21, Larry, now 42, might have gotten the professional help and medication his parents said he desperately needed. Instead of being released from institution after institution because doctors did not consider him dangerous, he might have been hospitalized before he became violent and uncontrollable. And if he had been institutionalized, his parents believe, he might have never committed his first and only act of violence — the brutal murder of five people in 1982 — for which he is scheduled to be executed on Friday.
Larry’s parents, Lois and Paul Robison, say there is an inverse relationship between funding for mental health care in Texas and funding for prison space and corrections. As the number of prison beds has swelled — from fewer than 40,000 in 1990 to more than 150,000 today — the number of non-prison beds for the mentally ill and mentally retarded has plummeted, from 8,000 10 years ago to fewer than 5,500 today. And just last year, the Texas Dept. of Mental Health and Mental Retardation decided to cut $5 million from funding for medications and another $2.4 million from funding for mental hospital beds.
Lois Robison, now 66, recalls begging state and county hospitals to admit her son, who was showing increasingly severe signs of psychosis, when he was 21. None would keep Larry for more than a month. The state mental hospitals “kept telling us that if [Larry] became violent, they would give him treatment, but they couldn’t do it before that,” Lois Robison says. “And instead of putting him in a mental institution [after the murders] like we expected, he went to death row. And I said, there’s something wrong with this. People don’t know what’s going on in Texas.”
What’s going on in Texas is an escalation in the number and frequency of executions, including the execution of juvenile offenders, the mentally retarded, and — most contentiously — the mentally ill. This month, seven condemned men were scheduled to die. Two were juveniles when they were convicted, one (Johnny Paul Penry, who was granted a temporary reprieve in December) is mentally retarded, and one — Robison — is mentally ill.
Although a new state law bars Texas from killing inmates who can’t understand that they are being executed and why, Robison’s supporters say that that definition of mental competency doesn’t account for illnesses, like Robison’s, which fluctuate in severity. Three different psychiatrists asked Larry if he understood the implications of and reasons for his sentence; using that standard, all three found him competent to be executed. But Lois Robison says the doctors “asked the wrong questions. … Even the doctors who examined him said his illness was cyclical: Sometimes he was ill and sometimes he was not.”
According to an affidavit submitted by a fourth psychiatrist, Dr. Henry A. Nasrallah, head of the department of psychiatry at Ohio State University, Larry Robison’s medical history “demonstrates that he was incompetent at numerous time periods over the past 20 years … and as recently as a few weeks prior to my assessment, at the time of his scheduled execution in August 1999.” At the time of his originally scheduled execution date in August — postponed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to give Robison’s lawyers a chance to prove he was incompetent — Robison was quoted as saying he felt like “a little kid at Christmastime waiting for Santa Claus to come.” When his new date was set in December, Robison requested Jan. 21 — a night with a full moon — because he believed it was “a good date for crossing over,” his mother says.
“There’s no question in my mind that he had severe psychological problems” at the time of the murders, says David Atwood, president of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty in Houston. “People say that if you talked to Larry you would not think anything was wrong with him, but that if you talked to him for any extended period of time it would become increasingly obvious.”
Atwood believes that Gov. George W. Bush is not at all bothered by the moral implications of executing someone who is mentally ill. “Everything is a political decision with him,” says Atwood. “I don’t think the moral dimensions ever enter into the politician’s mind.”
Atwood, along with hundreds of other activists, will travel to Huntsville on Friday to protest Robison’s execution. Lois and Paul Robison will also be in town, although they haven’t decided whether they will witness the execution. “This has been a horrendous thing for our family. It’s devastating,” Lois Robison says. “It’s so hard knowing the day and the hour and the minute they’re going to kill your son. … They don’t know what they do to the families.” But even after her son’s execution, Robison says, she won’t give up her crusade to secure better care for Texas’ mentally ill. “I’ll keep doing this as long as I can walk and talk and breathe,” she says. “It’s never been just about Larry. It’s about all the people who don’t get the care they need.”
Robison’s last-ditch plea for clemency — his appeals were exhausted earlier this month — was expected to be rejected a second time by the Board of Pardons and Paroles. Gov. Bush, who can grant a 30-day stay of execution, has said he will not do so in Robison’s case. Bush has in fact never granted a stay of execution, and the Board of Pardons and Paroles has only granted clemency once since Bush was elected governor in 1994.
This article appears in January 21 • 2000.