Joseph Corcoran is expected to be the first person executed by the state of Indiana in 15 years this month. The state has not executed someone since Matthew Wrinkles in 2009.
In 1999, Corcoran was convicted of killing four people, including his brother and his sister’s fiancé, with a semiautomatic rifle in Allen County. His sentence was the death penalty, which he is scheduled to face Dec. 18.
The state of Indiana has executed 22 people since 1976. Including Corcoran, eight inmates are currently on death row. After a 15-year hiatus due to several pharmaceutical companies refusing to sell their drugs to prisons for executions, Indiana governor Eric Holcomb said in June that the state’s Department of Corrections had acquired a drug used for lethal injections and planned to resume state executions.
In June, he and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita requested the Indiana Supreme Court set a date for Corcoran’s execution. Holcomb told the Indiana Capital Chronicle that he had been working on resuming executions for seven years, despite the necessary drugs being “harder to get for various reasons” and felt it was his duty to serve justice.
“In Indiana, state law authorizes the death penalty as a means of providing justice for victims of society’s most heinous crimes and holding perpetrators accountable,” Rokita said in a press release. “Further, it serves as an effective deterrent for certain potential offenders who might otherwise commit similar extreme crimes of violence.”
In September, the Indiana Supreme Court set a date for the execution. Corcoran exhausted his appeals in 2016. Since then, several groups have come forward condemning the sentence. Notably, the Indiana Abolition Coalition and Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty protested the decision to resume them at the Indiana Statehouse in November.
David Frank is president of the Indiana Abolition Coalition, an organization with a goal to abolish the death penalty. He said the upcoming execution would set a shocking precedent.
“Mr. Corcoran is undisputedly, seriously mentally ill,” Frank said. “The state is only able to proceed this far because Mr. Corcoran, in order to escape his suffering, has sought and desired to be executed.”
Doctors who interviewed Corcoran for the defense during his 1999 trial diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, a disorder that has caused him to experience delusions and hallucinations while in prison. His attorneys requested a stay of his execution date on Nov. 15, arguing his mental illness warranted a Ford claim.
Ford v. Wainwright was a 1986 Supreme Court case which ruled that imposing the death penalty on defendants who were “insane” violated the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause. The court classified “insane” defendants as those who were not aware of their upcoming execution or the reason for it.
“To be declared competent, you have to, number one, know the reason you're being executed,” Hayley Bedard, the communications associate for the Death Penalty Information Center, said. “Two, understand that the execution is imminent, and three, actually understand the link between one's crime and impending execution.”
In a proposed stay of execution, Corcoran’s attorneys said he did not rationally understand that he was sentenced to death for his quadruple murder conviction. In a Nov. 26 response in opposition to the stay, Rokita argued that because Corcoran’s signature was not on his attorneys’ petition, and it was unclear if he wanted post-conviction review, the stay was legally insufficient and should be denied.
Rokita also responded to the stay’s claim that Corcoran was severely mentally ill, pointing out a 2006 letter he wrote to a federal district court where he confessed to fabricating a delusion that the prison was torturing him with ultrasound.
Corcoran’s attorneys responded on Dec. 3, reemphasizing that his mental illness impacted the trial proceedings and his schizophrenia prevented him from “rationally understanding that the State intends to execute him because a jury found him guilty of murder.” They asserted that his attorneys’ signatures on his petitions were legally sufficient on his behalf. The final decision on the motion for a stay will be decided by the Indiana Supreme Court in the coming days.
His sentence will be carried out by using pentobarbital, instead of the three-drug combination used in previous Indiana executions. Bedard said Indiana has not released any public information as to how they acquired the drug, how much it costs or who the state acquired it from.
“Pentobarbital is a barbiturate and suppresses brain activity, their nervous system and breathing,” Bedard said.
In the 15 years since Indiana’s last execution, it’s been harder for the state to attain the necessary drugs for executions. Bedard said about a decade and a half ago, several pharmaceutical companies publicly came out saying they would no longer sell the drugs necessary for executions. The companies included Akorn, Hospira and Lundbeck and made it more difficult for states across the U.S. to carry out executions without the necessary drugs.
Anti-death penalty groups have concerns about pentobarbital and the possibility of botched executions due to the drugs being improperly stored or expired. In 2015, a scheduled execution had to be canceled in Georgia because the pentobarbital was kept at too cold of a temperature. It has already been used in 13 federal executions in Terre Haute, Indiana and for executions in 14 states.
“The state has just simply said, ‘This is what it is,’ but we have no idea,” Frank said. “It truly has the nature to, or however, it has the potential to cause, a long, prolonged death and suffering of the person who’s being executed.”
Alexander Mingus, the executive director of the Indiana Catholic Conference, said he thought the future of the death penalty in Indiana would be brought up once the Indiana General Assembly reconvenes Jan. 8.
“It sounds to me like, if nothing else, for the coming session, we are going to have a robust conversation about the death penalty,” Mingus said. “How is it applied? Is it applied fairly? Can we apply it fairly? How expensive is it for the state, for local governments, to go through the process?”
In Indiana, the average death penalty case can cost almost $800,000, over four times as much as the average life without parole case. That includes costs of execution, legal fees and incarceration costs. Indiana is one of 27 states where the death penalty is still legal.
“It would signal to Hoosiers, in I think, a negative way, that the state is willing to do this,” Mingus said. “Despite the expense, despite the moral questions, despite the inequitable application of the death penalty.”
