By Sabah Muhammad, Senior Legislative and Policy Counsel for Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) and speaker at the World Day Against The Death Penalty event held on October 9th, 2025.
Many of the tragedies that lead to capital crime cases are avoidable if family are heard and mental health treatment is provided in a timely and effective way. This truth was evident as family member, Eddie Mae Ellison, sister of Charles “Sonny” Burton, who is currently fighting for clemency on death row, shared her family’s harrowing story as part of Alabama’s four-part Fireside Chat series, Death penalty Conversations: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who decides.
I am deeply humbled and honored to have worked on this project alongside the Alabama Post-Conviction Relief Project (APCRP) and the ACLU of Alabama. The conversations were powerful, emotional, and necessary. Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) is a small but mighty nonprofit. Our mission is to remove barriers to timely treatment for people living with SMI. Our work is about early intervention, de-siloed medical and mental health systems, and ending the criminalization of SMI.
While capital punishment itself is not a barrier to treatment, it is, without question, a fatal outcome that too often follows a lifetime of cycling in and out of the mental health system. It is within TAC’s mission to acknowledge that any preventable tragedy in our database that began with an untreated mental health crisis could just as easily end with a death penalty sentence. How many beds on death row have been occupied by someone who once faced a psychiatric bed shortage during a mental health emergency?
Many of the individuals on death row, like David Lee Roberts, also fighting for his life on Alabama’s death row, have long histories of untreated psychosis, trauma, and medical neglect. Their illnesses went unrecognized, or worse, were criminalized. When a person’s symptoms are punished instead of treated, the system fails everyone, including the individual, their family, and especially the victims of preventable tragedies.
Preparing for the discussion reminded me just how disconnected our highest courts are from the sobering truth of what it means to live in chronic and persistent psychosis. When it comes to the criminal system, there is an insurmountable amount of work that must be done to ensure that SMI is understood as a health condition rather than a behavioral or moral failure.
The fireside chat series reminded me that progress happens when we listen to one another. When legal minds and passionate advocates come together to face the uncomfortable truth, that our system punishes illness instead of treating it, we take a step closer to real change. I am grateful for the chance to learn, to collaborate, and to continue the fight for a system that values intervention over deterioration and treatment over punishment.
