What part of 'crazy' didn't they understand the first time?

Andre Thomas is clearly not quite right in the head. How else would you explain the horrific crime that landed him on death row in the first place? As if tearing the hearts out of his estranged wife, and young son and daughter wasn't enough to get him an appointment with a shrink. while in jail awaiting trial he tore out one of his own eyes and started spouting Bible verses.

But since this all happened in Texas, and folks there wouldn't want a little thing like being crazy as a shithouse rat to get in the way of a good execution, Thomas was sent to death row rather than a mental hospital. In fact, he's apparently received little or no psychiatric care whatsoever during the last four years he's been on death row. Until last month that is, when he plucked out and ate his remaining eye. 

 

"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 wated 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 just how nuts do you have to be to kill and not be executed in Texas? Sometimes it's accident, sometimes it's not. But people end up just as dead. And what does it take to get to see the prison shrink? It seems in Texas, they've decided its cheaper to kill than to treat.