Execution date set for Indiana man who murdered his brother and three other men

The Indiana Supreme Court has set the date for the first state execution in 15 years .

The court ordered Wednesday that Joseph Corcoran be executed before sunrise on Dec. 18, WXIN-TV reported. Corcoran, 49, was convicted in July 1997 killings of his brother, James Corcoran; 30-year-old Douglas A. Stillwell; 32-year-old Robert Scott Turner; and 30-year-old Timothy Bricker, the Associated Press reported.

He was convicted of the killings and sentenced to death in 1999. But his attorneys argue the court should deny the request to set his execution date as they claim Corcoran has long been diagnosed as mentally ill and suffers from paranoid schizophrenia that causes him to experience “persistent hallucinations and delusions.”

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"An unspeakable tragedy took the lives of four people who unquestionably deserved to live," Corcoran's attorney noted. "This tragedy, however, has a nexus to a serious mental illness that persists through today."

They continued: "No one contests that Corcoran suffers from a mental illness. This is clear from his delusion that prison guards torture him daily with an ultrasound machine, his conversations with individuals who are not there, and his delusion that he suffers from an involuntary speech disorder."

His attorneys said they believe if it hadn't have been for Corcoran's mental illness, he could have avoided the death penalty as they claimed it "affected the decision-making process", noting Cocoran's “ultimate refusal to accept either a plea bargain or a bench trial without the death penalty was a product of his mental illness.”

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Indiana's last state execution was in 2009, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, when Matthew Wrinkles was executed for the murdering his wife, her brother and sister-in-law. Corcoran has been on death row since 1999. He exhausted his appeals in 2016.

The yearslong pause has been attributed to the unavailability of drugs used in lethal injections. Gov. Eric Holcomb said in June that the state Department of Correction had acquired the sedative pentobarbital, a drug multiple states use in lethal injections, and asked the Supreme Court to set a date for Corcoran's execution.

The first federal execution in 17 years at the time was carried out at a federal prison in Indiana in 2020.