Florida Department of Corrections via AP

John Errol Ferguson has been on Florida's death row for 34 years.

An 11th hour decision by a federal appeals court has blocked the scheduled execution of a mass killer convicted of eight slayings that jolted South Florida in the 1970s.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a last-minute request Tuesday night from attorneys for 64-year-old John Errol Ferguson, who has been on Florida's death row for 34 years. Ferguson's lawyers contend he should not be executed because he suffers from severe mental illness.

He was scheduled to die at 6 p.m. on Tuesday. His last meal, according to the Miami Herald, was a chicken country fried sandwich and sweet tea.

Florida officials immediately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the stay. The justices earlier Tuesday turned aside another Ferguson appeal.

Ferguson was convicted of killing eight people in South Florida in 1977 and 1978, including a teenage couple, and was a prime suspect in another double slaying. He suffers from paranoid schizophrenia but has previously been ruled competent for execution.

His lawyers say he believes he is the "Prince of God," according to the Miami Herald, to bolster their case that he is too mentally ill to be executed.

Phil Sears / AP

Death penalty opponents join in a chant across from Florida State Prison in Raiford, Fla. on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that inmates who suffer from "mental retardation" are exempt from the death penalty. According to the high court:

Mentally retarded persons frequently know the difference between right and wrong and are competent to stand trial, but, by definition, they have diminished capacities to understand and process information, to communicate, to abstract from mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, to control impulses, and to understand others’ reactions.

Their deficiencies do not warrant an exemption from criminal sanctions, but diminish their personal culpability.

NBC's Isolde Raftery contributed to this report.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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AP file

Marvin Wilson, 54, was executed by the State of Texas on Tuesday night.

A Texas man convicted of killing a police informant was executed Tuesday evening after the Supreme Court refused to hear arguments that he was mentally handicapped and therefore should not qualify for the death penalty, The Associated Press reported.

Marvin Wilson, 54, was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m., 14 minutes after his lethal injection began at the state prison in Huntsville.

Wilson’s attorneys had challenged his execution as unconstitutional under the 2002 decision Atkins v. Virginia, which banned executing mentally retarded people but gave states some discretion in deciding who qualified for protection.

In their appeal to the high court, his attorneys pointed to a psychological test conducted in 2004 that pegged Wilson's IQ at 61, below the generally accepted minimum competency standard of 70. Federal law bans executions of mentally handicapped people as cruel and unusual punishment.

The defendant was convicted of murder for the November 1992 killing of a 21-year-old police drug informant, Jerry Robert Williams, and was sentenced to death in April 1994.

Lower courts agreed with state attorneys, who argued that Wilson's claim was based on a single test that may have been faulty and that his mental impairment claim isn't supported by other tests and assessments of him over the years.

The Supreme Court denied his request for a stay of execution less than two hours before his lethal injection began. Lead defense attorney Lee Kovarsky said he was "gravely disappointed and saddened" by the ruling, calling it "outrageous that the state of Texas continues to utilize unscientific guidelines ... to determine which citizens with intellectual disability are exempt from execution."

In Wilson's Supreme Court appeal, Kovarsky said Wilson's language and math skills "never progressed beyond an elementary school level," that he reads and writes below a second-grade level and that he was unable to manage his finances, pay bills or hold down a job.

Edward Marshall, a Texas assistant attorney general, said records show Wilson habitually gave less than full effort and "was manipulative and deceitful when it suited his interest," and that the state considered his ability to show personal independence and social responsibility in making its determinations.

"Considering Wilson's drug-dealing, street-gambler, criminal lifestyle since an early age, he was obviously competent at managing money, and not having a 9-to-5 job is no critical failure," Marshall said. "Wilson created schemes using a decoy to screen his thefts, hustled for jobs in the community, and orchestrated the execution of the snitch, demonstrating inventiveness, drive and leadership."

Wilson was the seventh person executed by lethal injection in Texas this year. At least nine other prisoners in the nation's most active death penalty state have execution dates in the coming months, including one later this month.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Georgia Department of Correction

The Georgia Supreme Court halted the execution of Warren Lee Hill, who has been twice convicted of murder.

The Georgia Supreme Court halted the execution of Warren Lee Hill, a death-row inmate who had been scheduled to die at 7 p.m. on Monday at the state penitentiary at Jackson.

At issue is whether the Department of Corrections’ decision to switch to a one-drug formula violates state rules, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The state announced the change last week, which Hill’s lawyers challenged.  

The high court said in a statement Monday that it would consider the challenge because such a change requires public hearings and a 30-day public comment period.

Hill was the first inmate set to be executed in Georgia since the state changed its execution procedure last week from a three-drug injection to a single dose of the sedative pentobarbital.

Hill was convicted in the Aug. 17, 1990, beating death of another inmate. Hill was serving a life sentence at the time for the shooting death of his 18-year-old girlfriend.

His lawyers argue that Hill is mentally disabled – significant because federal law prohibits states from executing the mentally disabled. But the state said the defense hadn’t conclusively shown that Hill has a mental disability.

On July 18, Yokamon Hearn, 33, became the first prisoner killed with the one-drug formula. Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials announced last week they were modifying the three-drug injection method used since 1982 because the state's supply of one of the drugs — the muscle relaxant pancuronium bromide — has expired.

Hearn's lawyers had argued that his mother drank alcohol when she was pregnant, stunting his neurological development and leaving him with mental impairments that disqualify him from execution under earlier Supreme Court rulings. Testing shows Hearn's IQ is too high for him to be considered mentally impaired.

Ohio, Arizona, Idaho and Washington have already adopted a single-drug procedure.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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­­­­In 1987, Prosecutor Gary Van Brocklin addressed a panel of three judges deciding the fate of a man who had killed store clerk Ihsan Aydah of Youngstown, Ohio.

“Give him the same consideration he gave Ihsan Aydah – give him death,” Van Brocklin said. The judges agreed and sent the defendant, John Jeffrey Eley, then 38, to death row.

On Tuesday, 25 years after Eley was sentenced, Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted him clemency, in part because Van Brocklin, police detective Joseph Fajack and Judge Peter Economus changed how they felt about the case.

“It was something that bothered my conscience,” Van Brocklin told msnbc.com on Tuesday. “He wasn’t smart.”

At the time, a clinical psychologist found that Eley had borderline intelligence. Since then, a psychiatrist has found him to be mentally disabled -- relevant because the Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that mentally disabled defendants cannot be sentenced to death.

Van Brocklin recalled that Eley hadn't seemed sharp. The former county prosecutor, a self-described conservative Republican, said he had offered Eley a four-to-six year sentence in exchange for his testimony against his accomplice, Marvin Green. Green had given Eley the gun and told him to hold up the store.

But Eley refused to testify against his old friend.

“To this day, he quotes the Bible saying you shouldn’t be a witness,” Van Brocklin said. “But the Bible says you shouldn’t bear false witness. He’s not a bright guy.”  

There were other details about the case that bothered the three lawmen. Eley had waived his right to a jury trial – that wouldn’t happen today. Also, life without parole was not a possible sentence at the time.

“This was the kind of case that nowadays would not be indicted capitally,” Van Brocklin said. “John Eley killed a man – life without parole would be a fair punishment. I never felt that I was overzealous, but I felt that it wasn’t fair.”

In June, Judge Economus wrote the parole board: "If I had been presented the additional mitigating evidence outlined in the clemency petition at the time of the trial, especially evidence of Mr. Eley's low intellectual functioning, his impoverished childhood, his significant alcohol and substance abuse, and his probable brain impairment, I would have voted for a sentence less than death." 

It hadn't helped over the years that defending Eley was difficult, said Vicki Werneke, the assistant federal public defender who oversaw his case. Eley refused to be evaluated and spoke with her only by phone.

“He told his sisters he thought he would be released from prison and that Jesus was going to save him,” Werneke told msnbc.com. “I’m a believer and I think that maybe God did have a hand in it, but maybe it was through us.”  

But the state didn't heed their pleas. On June 20, exactly 10 years after the Supreme Court ruling, an Ohio parole board voted, 5-3, to uphold Eley's death sentence.

It was unusual for the board to be divided, Werneke said. Even more so, however, was that the governor overruled their decision.

Then again, Gov. Kasich appears to be examining death row cases. In September, he spared a man who had slashed a woman’s throat during a 1987 robbery, The Associated Press reported. The governor said he was compelled by the man’s mental health history and the story of his tragic childhood.

In June, the governor removed a man from death row because the details of the crime were “frustratingly unclear.”

Of the governor, Van Brocklin said, “I have to commend him for a courageous stand. It’s easy to run the other way.”

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Corpus Christi Police Dept. / AFP - Getty Images file

Carlos DeLuna was executed in 1989 for a crime a Columbia University Law School team believes was committed by another man named Carlos.

This spring, the editorial board at the Columbia Human Rights Law Review dedicated its final issue of the year to one article about two men named Carlos. Carlos DeLuna, the authors believe, was executed in Texas for a crime committed by Carlos Hernandez, who looked so much like him that one of their sisters confused the two in a photograph.

"Los Tocayos Carlos," which runs 451 pages and is available for free online, details the stabbing death of Wanda Lopez, a 24-year-old assistant manager at a gas station in Corpus Christi, Texas.

The article, which took six years, one professor and 12 students to produce, reads like a true-crime novel. It begins: “Wanda Lopez died at work at a Sigmor Shamrock gas station in Corpus Christi, Texas on February 4, 1983. She was twenty-four. Wanda’s only brother, Richard Vargas, heard her say her last words, but they gave him no solace or peace. They just made him angry.^”

There were two Carloses in the vicinity that night. An eye witness to the crime identified Carlos DeLuna as the man who had wrestled with Wanda Lopez, even though his clothes did not match the witness' original description.  

The law school team interviewed Carlos Hernandez's relatives, who revealed that on the day of the murder, before Carlos DeLuna was arrested, he told them that he had killed a woman named Wanda and that he felt badly about it. He said he didn't think he'd get caught.

Hernandez later told someone else that he had committed the murder and that "Carlos DeLuna took the fall."

Police told the Columbia investigators that Carlos DeLuna didn't have it in him to commit such a crime. DeLuna, a junior high drop out, had a low IQ and had been arrested for low-level crimes but was better known for huffing paint. Carlos Hernandez, by contrast, had raped children in the neighborhood and had been arrested for assaulting his wife with an ax handle, according to the Columbia University report.

Questioning how Carlos Hernandez, with his reputation, could have avoided scrutiny, the law school students and their professor discovered that Hernandez had been a police informant.

But not all police officers liked Carlos Hernandez -- their informants reported to them that Hernandez might have been to blame for other unsolved murders of Latina women.

California voters to consider ending capital punishment

The law school team strongly suggests that the case, beginning with Wanda Lopez's call to 911, was sloppily handled. A novice dispatcher took too long to send out a patrol car to the gas station where Wanda Lopez was knifed; the crime scene was immediately cleaned; investigators relied on one eye witness account.   

Years down the road, the state assigned DeLuna an attorney who had never tried a major case in court, but who landed the job, the law school team suggests, because his father was politically connected.

In 1989, Carlos DeLuna was executed by lethal injection. His tocayo, or namesake, Carlos Hernandez, died in jail in 1999.

California vote could remove one quarter of nation's death row

In the introduction, the authors write: “Los Tocayos Carolos poignantly reveals how easily our legal system can fail to produce just outcomes even without the deliberate interference of individuals acting in bad faith and how the consequences of such failures can be irrevocable and at times, fatal.”

Columbia Law Professor James S. Liebman told the Guardian that what struck him most as he conducted his research was that the story was mundane.

"This wasn't the trial of OJ Simpson,” Liebman said. “It was an obscure case, the kind that could involve anybody. Maybe those are the cases where miscarriages of justice happen, the routine everyday cases where nobody thinks enough about the victim, let alone the defendant."

Watch the most-viewed videos on msnbc.com

The Columbia Human Rights Review piece recalls work by Northwestern University Professor David Protess and his students to exonerate innocent death row inmates. In 2000, Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on Illinois’ death penalty.

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Lawyers for condemned inmate Edwin Hart Turner say it would be cruel and unusual punishment to execute someone who is mentaly ill.

Edwin Hart Turner is no stranger to mental illness.

According to his lawyer and acquaintances, his grandmother and great-grandmother were committed to state hospitals. His mother attempted suicide twice. His father was killed in a dynamite explosion that some believe was a suicide.

At age 18, Turner tried to kill himself with a rifle but the barrel of the weapon slipped just enough to spare his life; the bullet that blasted through his face left him permanently disfigured. He was hospitalized five years later when he tried to slit his wrists in another suicide attempt.

So when Turner robbed a gas station near Carrolton, Miss., early on Dec. 13, 1995, and fatally shot a clerk in the face and a customer in the head, his lawyers say, it’s almost certain that he was – and still is  – mentally unbalanced.

For that reason, says Turner’s attorney, Jim Craig of the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, Turner should not be put to death.

Turner’s accomplice, Paul Murrell Stewart, pleaded guilty to capital murder and was sentenced to life without parole. Turner was convicted at trial and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

In what he hopes will be a precedent-setting case, Craig is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court and to Mississippi’s new governor, Phil Bryant, to halt the scheduled Feb. 8 execution of the 38-year-old Turner.

“The Supreme Court has not decided the question of whether a prisoner with a severe mental disorder or disability which significantly impairs that person’s ability to rationally process information, to make reasonable judgments and to control their impulses, whether people in that category can be executed,” Craig told msnbc.com in a telephone interview Thursday.

“So we’re asking the Supreme Court to establish that it would be contrary to consensus of moral values, that it would be cruel and unusual punishment, to execute someone with severe mental illness.”

The Supreme Court in 2002 banned the execution of mentally retarded criminals. In 2005, justices ruled that it was also unconstitutional to put to death juvenile criminals. But the circumstances regarding the execution of inmates who are mentally ill - but not insane - are less clear-cut, though previous high court rulings have held that the mere presence of mental illness doesn’t necessarily exempt someone from execution.

Craig said he will also ask a federal judge on Friday to order the state to put the execution on hold so Turner can get a mental exam, including a modern type of neuroimaging scan that wasn’t available in 1995. Craig said he thinks the so-called “functional MRI” scan will show that the portion of Turner’s brain “that controls conduct that works for everyone else in this country just doesn’t work for him.”

“It’s like expecting someone with a broken arm to quarterback the Super Bowl,” Craig said. “It’s just not fair.”

Other rights groups are also backing Turner's cause.

“We’ve come a long way in our understanding of mental illness and the deep and terrible pain it inflicts on sufferers – but not far enough, at least not in Mississippi,” wrote Denny LeBoeuf, the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project director, in a blog post titled "Too Crazy to Kill." 

 “Most mentally ill people are not violent. Those who are should not be executed."

Gov. Bryant’s office and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s office did not immediately return telephone calls Thursday from msnbc.com for comment.

On Wednesday, Hood told The Associated Press that Turner has been evaluated numerous times in the past.

"He has raised the issue of mental health problems at every level and has been denied relief at every turn. We argue that his mental health claims have been fully addressed, and that this present action is nothing more than an attempt to re-litigate a claim that has been properly adjudicated at every turn," Hood said, according to the AP.

Earlier, in asking the state to set the Feb. 8 execution date, Hood said in a press release that Turner has exhausted his state and federal appeals. “These crimes were brutal and nothing short of cowardly,” he said.

Ann Dugger, executive director of the Justice Coalition, a victims' advocacy group, said mental illness in and of itself is not a reason to rule out execution.

"What's cruel and unusual is that a perpetrator would have taken the life of someone else and murdered him," she said.

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Rick Bowmer / AP

Gary Haugen, 49, is brought into the Marion County Courthouse in Salem, Ore., on Oct. 7. He plans to ask lawyers about possible legal action to fight Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber's temporary reprieve.

A condemned inmate who was scheduled to be executed next month has slammed Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber for giving him a reprieve, saying the governor didn't have the guts to carry out the execution.

Two-time murderer Gary Haugen had voluntarily given up his legal challenges, saying he wants to be executed in protest of a criminal justice system he views as broken. But Kitzhaber on Tuesday said he won't allow anyone to be executed while he is in office, calling Oregon's death penalty scheme "compromised and inequitable."

But in a telephone interview with the Statesman Journal on Friday, Haugen mocked Kitzhaber.

"I feel he's a paper cowboy," he said. "He couldn't pull the trigger."

Haugen's criticism reverses his earlier praise of Kitzhaber's decision during an interview with The Oregonian. He told the Portland newspaper that Kitzhaber cited some of the same criticism of the death penalty that Haugen has raised.

'A coward's move'
After further reflection, Haugen said he came to the conclusion that the governor "basically pulled a coward's move" by acting on his personal beliefs instead of carrying out the will of Oregon voters, who reinstated the death penalty in 1984.

Haugen said he learned of the reprieve when he was summoned from an outdoor exercise break at the state penitentiary and allowed to read the governor's statement.

Kitzhaber called Oregon's death penalty system "a perversion of justice," saying the state only executes people who volunteer. Since capital punishment was legalized 27 years ago, only two people have been executed in Oregon. Both of them, like Haugen, waived their legal challenges.

Kitzhaber encouraged "all Oregonians to engage in the long overdue debate that this important issue deserves" and said he would ask lawmakers to consider potential reforms during the 2013 legislative session.

The 49-year-old inmate said he plans to ask lawyers about possible legal action to fight Kitzhaber's temporary reprieve, which lasts until the governor leaves office. A Marion County judge had twice signed a death warrant ordering Haugen's execution. The first was reversed when the state Supreme Court intervened; the second was overruled by Kitzhaber two weeks before the Dec. 6 execution.

"I'm going to have to get with some serious legal experts and figure out really if he can do this," Haugen said. "I think there's got to be some constitutional violations. Man, this is definitely cruel and unusual punishment. You don't bring a guy to the table twice and then just stop it."