his execution, efforts were made to clear his name, and in the 1990s old evidence was re-examined with modern forensic techniques which supported the view that Ross was innocent. In 2006 an appeal for mercy was made to Victoria's Chief Justice and on 27 May 2008 the Victorian government pardoned Ross in what is believed to be an Australian legal first. U.S. mental health controversy There has been much debate about the justification of imposing capital punishment on individuals who have been diagnosed with mental disabilities. Some have argued that the execution of people with serious mental illness or intellectual disability constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. While the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted cruel and unusual punishment to include those punishments that fail to take into account the defendant's degree of criminal culpability, it has never held that it is unconstitutional to apply the death penalty to those with serious mental illness and did not determine that executing intellectually disabled individuals constitutes cruel and unusual punishment until 2002. In 1986, in Ford v. Wainwright, the US Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute a person who does not understand the reason for or the reality of his or her punishment. The issue of whether it is constitutional to execute those with severe mental illness has repeatedly arisen in the state of Texas, where at least 25 individuals with documented diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other severe persistent mental illnesses have been put to death. However, Ford applies only to the mental competency of the prisoner at the time of execution, not to the constitutionality of his or her death sentence. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the federal appeals court that handles cases from Texas, has narrowly construed Ford and has never found a death-row prisoner to be incompetent to be executed. In Panetti v. Quarterman, the Fifth Circuit held that a man with a long history of paranoid schizophrenia was competent to be executed because, despite his delusions, he was aware that the state intended to execute him for committing a particular murder. The US Supreme Court reversed, finding that the Fifth Circuit's incompetency standard was "too restrictive." The appropriate Eighth Amendment inquiry, the Court said, was whether Panetti had a "rational understanding" of the reason for his execution, not whether