Molly Ivins August 5

AUSTIN, Texas — On Aug. 17, the state of Texas is scheduled to kill Larry Robison, a paranoid schizophrenic whose insanity was diagnosed long before he committed a terrible crime. This is like putting someone to death for having cancer or being paraplegic. It is freakish that he ever stood trial at all.

Robison is the son of schoolteachers in Fort Worth. Ken and Lois Robison raised eight children together — four from her first marriage (her husband died of a malignant brain tumor when Larry was 2), two from his first marriage and two of theirs. She is now retired from teaching third grade, but Ken still teaches at the community college.

When Larry was a teen-ager, he began hearing voices, announcing that he had secret special mental powers and acting strangely. Lois Robison later learned that schizophrenia, a disease that often comes with a genetic heritage, ran in her late husband's family — one of Larry's uncles, a great-uncle and a great-grandfather all had it.

Larry joined the Air Force but was back home after one year. Only later was the family told that the Air Force dismissed him because of his bizarre behavior. Rather than provide him with any care, the Air Force gave him a general discharge.

His condition continued to deteriorate, and for four years his family tried desperately to get help for him. The Robisons are not wealthy, but they are well-educated and capable of fighting through complex layers of bureaucracy.

They got Larry to a private hospital, which let him go after two days upon learning that he was no longer on the Robisons' health insurance.

John Peter Smith, the public hospital in Fort Worth, kept him for 30 days and told the Robisons that it could keep him no longer because he was not violent.

Lois Robison begged and pleaded, and finally Larry was sent to a VA hospital that kept him for another 30 days and then had to let him go because, again, he had committed no violence against himself or others.

At one point, Larry spent six months in jail because his parents could not find a hospital that would take him. During his lucid periods, Larry begged his parents to please help. Again and again they were told: "He's not on your health insurance, so we can't take him ... he's never been violent ... unless he does something violent, there's nothing we can do."

And then he did.

On the night of Aug. 10, 1982, Larry Robison murdered five people.

He first killed his roommate, Ricky Bryant, in a hideous fashion, beheading and mutilating him in a manner that Larry believed was being dictated by the voices in his head, the clocks in the room and the stories of the Old Testament.

He then went to the house next door and shot and stabbed four people. The only reason they were killed is because they were there, as though the poor souls had been struck by lightning or all been in a car that ran into a bridge abutment. They were just there when Larry Robison finally went berserk after four years of being shunted through a state system that offers no help to those with a dangerous illness.

If he had any other illness that threatened other people, such as the new strain of tuberculosis, he would, of course, have been given treatment.

Larry readily confessed to the killings. He made two almost-successful suicide attempts while in police custody but was revived from a coma to face the death penalty.

The normal procedure in such a case is a plea bargain followed by commitment to the state hospital for the criminally insane. The four prosecutors working on the case were prepared to accept an insanity plea and permanent confinement in a mental institution. But Tarrant County District Attorney Tim Curry overruled his staff and put Larry on trial.

The infamous Dr. Death, James Grigson, whose testimony for the state in cases like this was so notoriously biased that he finally became the subject of a lawsuit himself, naturally testified that Larry Robison knew what he was doing and was able to tell right from wrong the night that the clocks told him to kill five people. Most of the well-established evidence of his madness was ruled inadmissible in court.

According to Lois Robison, one assistant district attorney told the heart-broken families of the victims that if Larry were allowed to plead insanity, he would be out in 30 days.

Tragically, the illness has since struck Larry's younger sister, Carol, and the Robisons began the same round of hopeless circular bureaucratic rejection with her.

"She's in a residential mental health facility in East Texas now and is doing fine," reports Lois Robison. "I had to fight like a tiger to get her there. I told Larry's story to anyone who would listen to get help for Carol.

"I got her Social Security by going down there and telling Larry's story at a very loud decibel level. But there's only the one good place in East Texas; they closed the one in Johnson County, near Burleson. The state is cutting mental health funds to build more prisons. One-third of the people in prison are mentally ill, and one-third of those on Death Row."

The state of Texas, which has the responsibility for treating the mentally ill, did nothing about Larry Robison for four years despite the desperate efforts of his family.

Having failed spectacularly in its own responsibility, thus helping bring about the deaths of five people, the state now presumes to kill Larry Robison for its own mistakes. When the cure or a means to control schizophrenia is found, almost certainly in the very near future, we will be regarded as cruel barbarians for executing someone who is simply sick.

Larry's sister Vicky Barnett has created a Web site with more information about the case: http://geocities.com/Athens/Pantheon/6765/index.html.

The governor, with a recommendation by the Board of Pardons and Paroles, could commute Larry Robison's death sentence. Heaven forbid that politics should enter this decision, but George W. Bush is not a candidate who needs to prove that he's for the death penalty — not after Karla Faye Tucker, and not after the record 37 executions in 1997 and 16 already this year.

It's time to see the compassion in compassionate conservatism.

 Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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