CLEVELAND, Ohio — A recent article published by the Death Penalty Information Center stated that Charles Maxwell, a person on death row convicted of murdering his child’s mother, has had his death sentence overturned under Ohio’s serious mental illness law after a mental evaluation.
In November 2005, Maxwell was charged with the murder of Nichole McCorkle. “Evidence at trial indicated that in the weeks leading up to her death, Ms. McCorkle had filed for a restraining order following a domestic violence incident,” the article asserted. In 2007, Maxwell was sentenced to death.
However, Ohio enacted a new law in 2021 that prevented individuals with serious mental illnesses from receiving the death penalty. According to the article, “The law outlines four qualifying diagnoses: (1) schizophrenia, (2) schizoaffective disorder, (3) bipolar disorder, or (4) delusional disorder.” But this law could only apply if there was substantial evidence that the accused was struggling with “severe mental illness” at the time of the murder.
Maxwell’s neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Siddartha Nadkarni, diagnosed that Maxwell suffered from delusional disorder due to “a series of traumatic brain injuries.” Nadkarni gave probable cause that Maxwell had delusional disorder when he murdered McCorkle. “Before his first injury in 1986, Mr. Maxwell had no criminal record; afterward, his behavior changed dramatically,” the article highlighted.
According to the article, Nadkarni, who has done research at NYU School of Medicine for 25 years and earned five board certifications, stated that “at the time of the crime, Mr. Maxwell was existing ‘in a state of perpetual threat and paranoia,’ misreading neutral cues as threats, convinced he was being followed and targeted for death and experiencing auditory hallucinations and out-of-body episodes.”
Individuals with severe mental illnesses sentenced to death were allotted one year to overturn their death sentences by petitioning the court “after Governor Mike DeWine signed the state’s SMI legislation into law in 2021.” In December 2025, an evidentiary hearing was held for Maxwell after “he filed his petition in April 2022.”
Opposing Nadkarni, the state also assigned an expert to examine Maxwell. “Dr. Stephen Noffsinger, a forensic psychiatrist at University Hospital, testified that Mr. Maxwell did not meet the SMI standard, stating his belief that prior evaluations would have detected delusional disorder if it had been present, and opined that Dr. Nadkarni’s methodology was unreliable,” the article stated.
Noffsinger argued that the diagnosis of Maxwell’s delusional disorder did not prove severe enough to meet the standards aligned with “the Model Penal Code standard for not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI).” This meant that Maxwell’s qualifying mental illness would have to have been so serious that it severely impaired his ability “to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or conform his behavior to law.”
The article continued by stating that there was a pretrial record from 2006 shown to Noffsinger of Maxwell’s “delusional thinking,” such as paranoia, referential ideation and auditory hallucinations. However, Noffsinger recognized this as “malingering” and did not believe it to be consistent with the requirements of the SMI statute.
The court analyzed both sides of the argument. Judge David T. Matia later “rejected Dr. Noffsinger’s opinion on several grounds.” It was stated, “The Ohio General Assembly explicitly wrote the SMI legislation to require something less than legal insanity: ‘a severe mental illness substantially impacts one’s ability to conform their conduct to the requirements of law,’ (emphasis original).”
In consideration of this, the court evaluated previous examinations of Maxwell, including the pretrial record. The court determined that Maxwell’s conditions aligned with the standards of the statute, as there was also a circumstance where a neurological test suggested by Maxwell’s expert had not been performed.
Concluding the article, “The court ultimately accepted Dr. Nadkarni’s testimony as the more medically and psychiatrically sound opinion, finding that his specialized expertise in neurology, brain injury, and the neurobiological basis of delusional disorder gave him a stronger basis for the diagnosis.” Matia also noted that Maxwell’s disorder had disrupted his capacity for rational judgment.
As of right now, Ohio is one of two states, besides Kentucky, that has legislation exempting those accused with serious mental illness from the death penalty. Other states, such as California, have recently brought into question the possibility of this after the overturning of Omar Deen’s conviction, who was charged with double murder. “[T]his court and/or the Legislature will eventually need to determine whether the reasoning [that created categorical exemptions to the death penalty in Atkins v. Virginia and Roper v. Simmons] applies to the execution of individuals suffering from severe mental illness,” three justices from the California Supreme Court noted.
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