Texas Tech Law Professor Brian Shannon to Receive Texas Bar Foundation Award

A Texas Tech law professor has won a notable award.

The Texas Bar Foundation has announced that Brian Shannon, the Charles B. “Tex” Thornton Professor of Law at the Texas Tech School of Law, along with Dr. Victor R. Scarano, a psychiatrist and attorney in Houston, will receive the 2014 Outstanding Law Review Article Award.

The Outstanding Law Review Article Award honors a law review article published by one of the Texas law schools during the preceding calendar year.

The winning article, “Incompetency to be Executed: Continuing Ethical Challenges & Time for a Change in Texas,” was published by the Texas Tech Law Review in 2013.

The article focuses on a small group of death-row inmates who have largely exhausted their post-conviction procedural rights and have had a date set for execution, but while awaiting execution, have become incompetent due to serious mental illness.

The Supreme Court of the United States has determined that it is unconstitutional to execute a person who is mentally incompetent, but has not ruled on whether it is constitutionally permissible for a state to order a death row inmate to be medicated forcibly to restore that inmate’s competency to allow an execution to proceed.”

The Bar Foundation will provide a $1,000 donation to the Texas Tech School of Law in Shannon’s honor. The award presentation will be June 27^th at the Bar Foundation’s annual dinner, which takes place during the State Bar of Texas annual meeting in Austin.

Shannon also serves as Texas Tech’s NCAA faculty athletics representative.