Death Row inmate inflicts self-injury (WARNING! DISTURBING CONTENT!)

Plot Device

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Okay, I kept the thread title as tame as could be. So, for you brave souls who actually clicked, here goes ....

Back in early December, as he sat in his Death Row prison cell in Texas, Andre Thomas, age 25, plucked out his own eyeball and ate it.

It gets more gruesome.

It was evidently his only good eye. His other eyeball was already missing ... because it was LIKEWISE plucked out --by his own hand-- back in 2004 as he awaited trial for a triple-murder. He had killed his wife and their two sons: a newborn infant and a 4-year old. The eyeball incident back in 2004 caused a judge to deem him incompetant to stand trial. So he's been on Death Row ever since.

(And in addition to murdering the wife and the kids, he also pulled out their hearts and stuffed them raw and dripping and totally uncovered into his pockets, went home, and then trash canned them.)

Here's a quote from the story that (I think) justifies this entire thread as being MORE than just a freak show shock-thread, and makes it a topic worthy of discussion.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090109/ap_on_re_us/death_row_eye


Texas death row inmate pulls out eye, eats it

By MICHAEL GRACZYK, Associated Press Writer -- January 9, 2009

HOUSTON--

[...]

A death-row officer at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found Thomas in his cell with blood on his face and took him to the infirmary.

""Thomas said he pulled out his eye and subsequently ingested it," agency spokesman Jason Clark said Friday.

Thomas was treated at East Texas Medical Center in Tyler after the Dec. 9 incident. Then he was transferred and remains at the Jester Unit, a prison psychiatric facility near Richmond southwest of Houston.

"He will finally be able to receive the mental health care that we had wanted and begged for from day 1," Bobbie Peterson-Cate, Thomas' trial attorney, told the Sherman Herald Democrat. "He is insane and mentally ill. It is exactly the same reason he pulled out the last one."

So this guy is a CERTIFIABLE NUT-CASE, and yet the system hasn't truly attended to his mental health issues for the past 5 years.



.
 
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KTC

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Or did he do it so he can prove that he is insane even though he isn't?
 

William Haskins

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Okay, I kept the thread title as tame as could be. So, for you brave souls who actually clicked, here goes ....
The eyeball incident back in 2004 caused a judge to deem him incompetant to stand trial. So he's been on Death Row ever since.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090109/ap_on_re_us/death_row_eye

.

please edit your post. i'm not sure how a news story that clearly says "competent" got changed to "incompetant" (and spelled wrong) in your version, but it does alter the thrust of the story.
 
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Zoombie

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Ugh.

I'm anti-death penalty cause it just causes shit like this. Either he's insane or he's determined enough to pluck out an eyeball for freedom. I say, sure, don't kill him...just keep his blind ass in JAIL.

FOREVER!
 

Ol' Fashioned Girl

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Okay... I typed my opinion and deleted it because of the 'incompetent'. Now I'm gonna say it:

Yeah, I'm hard-hearted. It's a shame he couldn't cut out his own heart and stuff it in his pocket.
 

KTC

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Um .... at what net benefit? (He's now permanently BLIND fer krysaik!)

And the ripping-out-the-hearts thing??

Eww!


There is a difference, in my mind, from insanity and someone viciously murdering his family and removing their hearts. And if you are so afraid of being put to death because of the crimes you committed, I think blindness to save your life would be a reasonable trade-off.

Pulling your eyes out and eating them does not a crazy person make. It would make someone who is manipulative enough to disfigure himself to get what he wants...in this case his own life.

He would need psychiatric assessment to determine insanity...not eyeballs in his stomach.
 

KTC

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please edit your post. i'm not sure how a news story that clearly says "competent" got changed to "incompetant" (and spelled wrong) in your version, but it does alter the thrust of the story.


Clearly they declared him competent because they saw the first eyeball incident as an attempted manipulation of the judicial system...but that is just my speculation. He clearly thought, "Maybe if I pluck out the other one, they'll take me off death row and allow me to live...surely they will then see me as insane." Desperation makes people do some pretty bizarre things...but again, this is just my speculation.

Insane? I doubt it. Hoping to be declared insane? Probably.
 

William Haskins

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yes, my comment was strictly related to the logical cohesion of this thread.

as for everything else, fuck him. he's blind, and might be crazy, but his wife and kids are deader than fried chicken.

send him to hell.
 

Plot Device

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Clearly they declared him competent because they saw the first eyeball incident as an attempted manipulation of the judicial system...but that is just my speculation. He clearly thought, "Maybe if I pluck out the other one, they'll take me off death row and allow me to live...surely they will then see me as insane." Desperation makes people do some pretty bizarre things...but again, this is just my speculation.

Insane? I doubt it. Hoping to be declared insane? Probably.

KTC, thank you for the quote.

*goes to re-edit the OP*
 

Plot Device

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There is a difference, in my mind, from insanity and someone viciously murdering his family and removing their hearts. And if you are so afraid of being put to death because of the crimes you committed, I think blindness to save your life would be a reasonable trade-off.

Pulling your eyes out and eating them does not a crazy person make. It would make someone who is manipulative enough to disfigure himself to get what he wants...in this case his own life.

He would need psychiatric assessment to determine insanity...not eyeballs in his stomach.


I look at it this way: when you try to pull a fast one on a judge and/or a court-appointed shrink, you're taking a gamble that your bluff won't pay off. So in the event that you not only lose a piece of your body, but you ALSO lose your wager, you have to accept the booby prize of doing hard time in the Big House. And having zero vision in the Big House is a sure way to achieve a quick death.

Of all the disadvantages you can theroretically inflict upon a human opponent, the permanent and 100% loss of their vision is perhaps the easiest way to render them utterly helpless.

So if this is a con game, he bet the farm on this one, and then some. (So either way he's STILL crazy.)
 

Plot Device

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CRAZY is not equivalent to "innocent by reason of insanity". The legal definition of the latter is very specific, and not simply a reflection of some form of mental illness.

caw


Okay. I will give you that. So he's guilty but still crazy.

So did he get ANY mental health care in that prison before the second eyeball got eaten? If he did, then his lawyers have nothng to complain about. But if he's gotten ZERO mental care, then I see that as a problem.
 

KTC

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People get stabbed, beaten, murdered, gang-raped in prison, all the time. It's not like they're all under visual surveillance 24/7.

caw


Plus, plucking out your eye and swallowing it would take approximately 5 seconds.
 

Plot Device

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Exactly how did he do this with no one noticing?


He was all alone in his cell, and I guess there was no one watching him (or they felt no need to watch him). And I hear crazy people can inflict self-mutilation and not feel pain, or somehow they can ignore the pain.

And I don't think it takes more than a few seconds to gouge out an eyeball (okay, maybe a whole fifteen seconds).
 

Cyia

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Ah -- I read the article wrong. I thought the first eyeball plucking was more recent. I couldn't figure out why they weren't watching him.
 

KTC

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Ah -- I read the article wrong. I thought the first eyeball plucking was more recent. I couldn't figure out why they weren't watching him.

As long as you can figure out why he isn't watching them. (-;
 

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Well, with a history of self-mutilation, SOMEBODY should have been keeping an eye on him!

Funny, in a nasty mordant sort of way, just the kind of thing I like. But it needs to be remembered that the people who take guard positions in these kinds of institutions tend to be the same people who flunked metal shop in high school. And the enthusiasm for having to deal with these kinds of subhumans has to drain the energy of anybody.

caw