Scott Panetti Case Roundup: Dallas Morning News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and more
Stefanie Faucher
This piece contains editorials and opinion pieces from:
Dallas Morning News - Editorial: Insanity of Panetti execution
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Editorial: Texas Gov. Rick Perry should spare Wisconsin native Scott Panetti
Beaumont Enterprise - Editorial: Inmate needs sanity verified before execution
Bloomberg View - Satel op-ed: Don't Execute Schizophrenic Killers
Washington Times - Bozell, Nolan, and Viguerie op-ed: When the death penalty is immoral
CNN - Powers op-ed: The atrocity of Texas killing a mentally ill man
The Week - Laurence op-ed: The atrocity of Texas killing a mentally ill man
Huffington Post - Hood op-ed: Killer Christians in Texas: The Next Victim is Scott Panetti
New York Times - Justices Urged to Intervene in Execution of Texas Man
Associated Press - Texas parole board refuses condemned inmate
Associated Press - US Supreme Court asked to halt execution of Texas inmate who lawyers say is too mentally ill
NBC News - 'Delusional' Killer Scott Panetti Asks Supreme Court to Halt Execution
TIME - Texas Plans to Execute a Schizophrenic Man Who Tried to Subpoena Jesus
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Texas Governor Rick Perry Asked to Stop Scott Panneti’s Execution
Huffington Post - Conservatives Call On Rick Perry To Halt Execution Of Scott Panetti
The Atlantic - Will Texas Execute a Mentally Ill Man?
The Marshall Project - A Plea from the Right
Mother Jones - Despite Conservatives' Pleas, Texas Board Rejects Clemency for Mentally Ill Convict
Democracy Now - Segment w/ Kathryn Kase, attorney for Scott Panetti
The Week - Diverse coalition opposes execution of mentally ill convict in Texas
Al Jazeera America - Attorneys petition Supreme Court to stay mentally ill man's execution
Indo-Asian News Service/Agencia EFE - US lawyers try to prevent execution schizophrenic inmate
Christian Post - Texas Denies Stay of Execution for Mentally Ill Man; Lawyers Plead Supreme Court to Intervene
Texas Tribune - Panetti Fate in Hands of Perry, Appeals Courts
San Antonio Express-News - Schizophrenic killer who addressed jury as 'Sgt. Ironhorse’ set to die
WOAI-FM(TX) - Hill Country Killer Faces Execution Despite Mental Illness Claims
KSAT-TV (ABC, TX) - Texas to execute Scott Panetti Wednesday despite mental illness
Richmond Times-Dispatch - Cuccinelli, Earley ask Texas to spare life of mentally ill killer
The Hill - Conservatives to Perry: Commute sentence of mentally ill death row inmate
Christian Newswire - Conservative Leaders Ask Gov. Perry to Spare Life of Severely Mentally Ill Man
The Daily Mail UK - Left-wing activists, conservatives and Christian leaders in bid to save life of 'delusional' Texas death row inmate ahead of Wednesday execution
The Independent UK - Scott Panetti execution: Activists in last-ditch bid to halt death of mentally ill killer in Texas
The Irish Mirror - Scott Panetti execution: Protesters make desperate bid to stop paranoid schizophrenic killer getting lethal injection
Latin Post - Conservative Leaders Petition Texas Governor Against Execution of Severely Mentally Ill Death Row Inmate
Gospel Herald - Scott Panetti Execution: Conservatives Urge Texas Gov. Perry to Reconsider Death Sentence of Mentally Ill Man
Wheeler News Service (Wisconsin news service) - Wisconsin man faces death penalty in Texas
Conservative HQ.com - Conservative Leaders Ask Gov. Perry to Spare Life of Severely Mentally Ill Man
Breitbart News Network - Texas Set to Execute Man Lawyers Argue is Mentally Ill
Russia Times - Lawyers ask federal court to halt execution of schizophrenic man in Texas
Sputnik News - UN Experts Urge US, Texas Authorities Not To Execute Mentally Ill Prisoner
Blessed are the Crazy (mental illness blog) - Texas’ Mental Health Fail
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http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/20141201-editorial-insanity-of-panetti-execution.ece
Insanity of Panetti execution
December 1, 2014
The state of Texas appears to be operating absent a moral and legal compass in its determination to execute Scott Panetti, a seriously mentally ill inmate, on Wednesday.
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Tom Price has properly called into question the very rationale for the execution, in a pointed dissenting opinion in the case last week. Breaking from the 6-3 court majority, which denied a stay of execution, Price said that ending Panetti’s life would serve neither of two purposes commonly cited by capital punishment proponents — deterrence and retribution.
It was stunning to read such a frank critique of the case from a veteran member of the state’s highest criminal court. It was even more stunning when this sitting judge, in the same breath, declared the death penalty indefensible as a punishment in a modern society. Price wrote that capital punishment is subject to too much human error and is out of step with “evolving societal values.”
Even unswayed death penalty supporters should have problems with carrying out the Panetti execution. He shot his parents-in-law to death with a hunting rifle in front of his estranged wife and daughter in Fredericksburg in 1992. At the time, he had a 14-year documented history of mental problems, including schizophrenia and involuntary commitments to mental facilities. Panetti’s breaks with reality were never in question, yet he was somehow allowed to represent himself in a death penalty trial that ranged from the bizarre to the pathetically absurd.
Today, one legal question is whether Panetti is sane enough to execute. The state argues yes, within broad parameters set out by the Supreme Court on executing the severely mentally ill. The court has said the defendant must have a “rational understanding” of why the punishment is being applied, but there is frustratingly little more direction than that.
Price is clear with his take on the matter. There is no difference, he said, between constitutional protections against executing intellectually disabled defendants and the severely mentally ill. In neither case, we would agree, is a social good achieved. Such an execution serves only a mindless sense of revenge.
In a separate case last week — in the made-for-Hollywood matter of East Texas killer Bernhardt Tiede II — the Court of Criminal Appeals acknowledged that mental state should have a bearing on punishment. Tiede is the person for whom the 2011 Richard Linklater movie Bernie is named, a real-life Carthage funeral director who befriended and then murdered a rich widow, Marjorie Nugent.
The appeals court agreed that Tiede would not have received a life sentence had jurors known he suffered sexual abuse as a child, a claim that surfaced only recently. That childhood trauma, the court said, explains Tiede’s break from reality when he shot Nugent in the back four times in 1996.
Today, Tiede walks free and may never return to prison. And Panetti, whose documented delusions span decades, may have only two more days to live.
‘Inconceivable to me’
Excerpts from Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Tom Price’s dissent last week from the court majority that denied a stay in Scott Panetti’s execution:
“It is inconceivable to me how the execution of a severely mentally ill person such as applicant would measurably advance the retribution and deterrence purposes purportedly served by the death penalty.”
“I am convinced that, because the criminal justice system is run by humans, it is naturally subject to human error. There is no rational basis to believe that this same type of human error will not infect capital murder trials.”
“Evolving societal values indicate that the death penalty should be abolished in its entirety. Since Texas enacted life without parole as a punishment for capital murder, Texas district attorneys have significantly decreased their requests for the death penalty, and juries today often prefer that punishment to the death penalty.”
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Texas Gov. Rick Perry should spare Wisconsin native Scott Panetti
December 1, 2014
Scott Panetti should be held accountable for what he did — for shooting his wife's parents to death in 1992. But he should not be executed. Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry has the power to stop it before Panetti's scheduled death by lethal injection on Wednesday, and Perry should do so.
Panetti's lawyers have argued that killing Panetti, a native of Hayward, would "cross a moral line" and prove to be a "miserable spectacle."
They are right on both counts.
On Monday, a letter signed by a dozen conservative leaders led by Richard Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, urged Perry to spare Panetti.
They wrote: "Mr. Panetti is one of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners on death row in the United States. Rather than serving as a measured response to murder, the execution of Mr. Panetti would only serve to undermine the public's faith in a fair and moral justice system."
More than 75,000 people have signed a petition asking Perry to commute Panetti's sentence to life in prison without parole. That includes former presidential candidate Ron Paul and evangelical Christians, who argue that the government cannot be trusted with such matters. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals voted 5-4 to deny Panetti's appeal last week; his case now sits before federal court.
Panetti was a standout football player at Poynette High School before descending into the depths of mental illness. He dropped out of high school before graduation, joined the Navy and was discharged after hearing voices and hallucinating. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized 15 times over the next 14 years, all leading up to the tragedy that unfolded in Fredericksburg, Texas, on Sept. 8, 1992, when Panetti killed Joe and Amanda Alvarado.
Panetti's lawyers say that he thinks he is being put to death by Satan. Lawyers for the state claim that tapes of him talking to his parents show that he knows exactly why he is being executed.
But it's hard to imagine that Panetti would have been able to fake his illness for more than 20 years. The more likely explanation for his behavior both on the night of the murders and since is mental illness.
John Blume, a professor at Cornell University Law School, told the Journal Sentinel's Meg Kissinger that Panetti's case is a tragedy.
"This train never should have left the station," he said. "Panetti should never have been found competent to stand trial and to represent himself, and he shouldn't be allowed to be executed."
We agree, and Perry can see to it that he is not. There is no justice in killing a mentally incompetent man. There is justice both for the victims — and, in this case, for Panetti — by commuting his death warrant to a life sentence.
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EDITORIAL: Inmate needs sanity verified before execution
By Enterprise editorial staff, December 2, 2014
Some people deserve to be put to death for their crimes. A good example would be Michael Lee Lockhart, who was executed in 1997 for the 1988 murder of Beaumont police officer Paul Hulsey. Lockhart was a vicious serial killer, and he wasn't insane. Good riddance to him, and may Officer Hulsey never be forgotten.
But Scott Panetti, scheduled to be executed tomorrow in Huntsville, is a different case. Many doctors believe that Panetti is insane - not a faker, not temporarily out of it, but a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. At a bare minimum, that execution must be postponed until his condition can be evaluated. At this point, lethal injection would be an injustice.
Panetti's guilt is not in question. He murdered two in-laws in 1995, but his sanity was in doubt even then. At his trial, he dressed like a cowboy and did many other bizarre things.
Prosecutors maintain that Panetti's lawyers have "severely exaggerated" his condition even though they acknowledge past indications of mental illness. Regrettably, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles refused a petition from Panetti's lawyers to delay his execution for 180 days or recommend that Gov. Rick Perry commute his sentence to life in prison.
That pretty much leaves the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. It should issue a stay to ensure that an irreversible mistake is not made. After all, Panetti's crime occurred 19 years ago; a few more months shouldn't matter if it turns out he does deserve the death penalty after all.
This is not about being tough on crime. Mentally ill murderers must be handled differently than sane ones. The first distinction is that they should not be put to death for actions they did not understand or could not control.
The state of Texas must reaffirm this basic legal and moral point now, and any other time it is required in the future.
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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-01/dont-execute-schizophrenic-killers
Don't Execute Schizophrenic Killers
By Sally L. Satel, DEC 1, 2014
Sally L. Satel is a psychiatrist and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Is someone who was diagnosed with schizophrenia years before committing murder sane enough to be sentenced to death?
The government thinks so in the case of Scott L. Panetti, 56, who will die on Wednesday by lethal injection in Texas unless Governor Rick Perry stays the execution.
On Sept. 8, 1992, Panetti shaved his head, dressed in military fatigues, grabbed a sawed-off shotgun, drove to the home of his in-laws and killed them. Turning himself in, Panetti told the police he had been controlled by a personality called “Sarge.”
His bizarre explanation isn’t by itself proof of psychosis; people who commit crimes are known to say weird things to deflect blame. Yet Panetti’s long-standing history of mental illness is undisputed. First diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978, he was hospitalized for hallucinations and delusions at least a dozen times from 1981 to 1993.
One of his fixations for years was that he would be put to death as part of a satanic conspiracy to prevent him from preaching the gospel.
Yet at his 1995 trial, the judge somehow allowed Panetti to act as own lawyer. As he presented his insanity defense, Panetti wore a cowboy outfit, insisting he was the Ringo Kid from the 1939 movie "Stagecoach." He rambled incoherently, fell into a trance-like state and sought to subpoena witnesses including Pope John Paul II, Anne Bancroft, Jesus Christ and “Sarge.”
This was evidence of Panetti’s mental defect, not a show he put on to appear irrational. In the end, the jury rejected his insanity plea and sentenced him to death.
Nine years later, Panetti’s lawyers sought a stay of execution, claiming he was too incompetent to be executed. A federal judge denied the motion and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the judge’s ruling because Panetti was factually aware that the state planned to execute him for the murders.
Then in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that factual awareness isn't sufficient. In Panetti v. Quarterman, the court overruled the Fifth Circuit, 5 to 4, and held that the determination of whether someone is competent to be executed must take into account the person’s rational understanding of why he is to be put to death.
Panetti seemed to lack a rational understanding of his execution: He believed the he was being put to death because Satan was working with the state of Texas to stop him from preaching. Unfortunately, the justices refused to set precise guidelines for determining whether someone is competent enough to be executed. Nor did they overturn his sentence.
Subsequent motions failed, and a request for a stay of execution filed last month by Panetti’s volunteer lawyers was denied.
This is unjust. It is wrong to execute, even to punish, people who are so floridly psychotic when they commit their crimes that they are incapable of correcting the errors by logic or evidence.
Yet Texas, like many other states, considers a defendant sane as long as he knows, factually, that murder is wrong. Indeed, Panetti’s jury, which was instructed to apply this narrow standard, may have been legally correct to reject his insanity defense because he may have known that the murders were technically wrong.
One way to fix this is to broaden the definition of insanity to cover defendants whose crimes flowed directly from delusional thinking, extreme paranoia or command hallucinations. To be clear, it would not be enough for a murderer to point to a record of mental illness. Depression, anxiety or drug-induced paranoia, for example, should not be exculpatory. What’s key is the severe deficit in the ability to reason. Such defendants should be confined and treated in mental hospitals, not punished by the criminal justice system.
Even if states are unwilling to extend the insanity defense and insist on sending these defendants to prison, they should not be allowed to execute them. In these cases, the Supreme Court should hold that death is a cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. After all, the court provided protection for another class of cognitively compromised individuals in 2002, when it ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that executing mentally disabled individuals violates the Eighth Amendment.
A 2006 report from an American Bar Association panel proposed a sensible standard, urging that people “should not be executed or sentenced to death if, at the time of the crime, they had a severe mental disease that significantly impaired their capacity to (a) appreciate the nature, consequences and wrongfulness of their conduct, (b) exercise rational judgment in relation to conduct, or (c) conform their conduct to the requirements of the law.”
By this standard, Governor Perry must stay Panetti's execution. The state would serve no civilized purpose in killing him.
To contact the author on this story:
Sally Satel at ssa...@aei.org
To contact the editor on this story:
Katherine Roberts at krobe...@bloomberg.net
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/1/brent-bozell-pat-nolan-richard-viguerie-scott-pane/
When the death penalty is immoral
By Brent Bozell, Pat Nolan and Richard Viguerie, December 1, 2014
When Scott Panetti stood in court to defend himself against charges of killing his in-laws, he cut quite a figure. Wearing a purple cowboy costume and bandanna, he showed bizarre behavior in the courtroom. He picked one juror with the flip of a coin. He attempted to subpoena more than 200 witnesses, including John F. Kennedy, the pope and Jesus Christ. He slept through some of the testimony.
This was no act cooked up to get him off of murder charges. Panetti had a documented history of mental illness going back to when he was 20 years old. He has been hospitalized involuntarily on 14 occasions. His diagnoses included chronic schizophrenia, paranoia, hallucinations and fragmented personality, for which he was prescribed high doses of powerful psychiatric drugs. He was termed manic and delusional. He heard voices and thought he was controlled by an unseen power. Panetti once nailed the curtains shut in his house to seal out the devil. It is clear that he has been suffering from severe mental illness since long before committing the offense that landed him on death row.
In 1986, Panetti believed he was engaged in spiritual warfare with Satan and he was convinced that the devil was in his home, leading his wife to sign an affidavit to have him involuntarily committed. She testified that he attempted to exorcize his home with a series of inexplicable behaviors, including burying his furniture in the backyard. Bizarre manifestations of his illness continued, virtually unabated, right up until the tragic day in 1992 when he killed his wife’s parents.
Despite this long record of mental illness, Panetti was found competent to be tried and to waive his right to counsel. Incredibly, the Texas trial court allowed this delusional man to present his own “defense,” which he did in the bizarre manner we’ve described. He was convicted and is scheduled to be executed Wednesday.
We are leaders in the conservative movement, and no one could accuse us of being soft on crime. There is much debate about the effectiveness and the morality of the death penalty. Some crimes are so terrible, and committed with such clear malice, that some believe execution is the only appropriate and proportional response. But Scott Panetti’s is no such case. He is one of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners on death row in the United States. Rather than serving as a measured response to murder, the execution of Panetti would only serve to undermine the public’s faith in a fair and moral justice system.
Now just a day away from his scheduled execution, Panetti continues to suffer from the manifestations of his mental illness, believing that he will be executed for preaching the Gospels to his fellow prisoners, not for the murder of his in-laws.
The authority to take a man’s life is the most draconian penalty that we allow our government to exercise. As conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought. It would be immoral for the government to take this man’s life, and we urge the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend to Gov. Rick Perry that he commute Panetti’s death sentence.
Brent Bozell is founder and president of the Media Research Center and chairman of ForAmerica. Pat Nolan is a former California state assemblyman who served 15 years as president of Justice Fellowship. Richard Viguerie is the author of “Conservatives Betrayed” (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2006) and chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.
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http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/02/opinion/powers-texas-execution/
The atrocity of Texas killing a mentally ill man
By Ron Powers, December 2, 2014
Editor's note: Ron Powers is at work on a book about mental illness and the state of America's mental-health care. He is the author of, among other books, "Mark Twain: A Life" (Free Press) and "Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America" (St.Martin's Press).
(CNN) -- On Wednesday night, barring an intervention of common decency, common sense and common compassion, the state of Texas will execute a man who scarcely comprehends who he is, let alone the reason why he will be put to death.
The man is Scott Panetti, a hopelessly unhinged paranoid schizophrenic. No one disputes that in 1992, Panetti gunned down the mother and father of his estranged wife in cold blood. No one disputes that this was a horrendous wastage of innocent human life.
Nor does anyone dispute that at the time, Panetti was enmeshed in deep psychosis. His madness was no secret. He had been hospitalized 14 times before the killings.
The hospital system failed him. It could not or did not protect him from his demons, though regimens of medication and psychiatric supervision have repeatedly been shown to stabilize patients in his condition. Maybe his caregivers were overworked in an underfunded system.
Then the Texas courts failed him. At his murder trial, the judge permitted this manifestly brain-ravaged man to act as his own lawyer. What a hoot that must have been. Reporters in the courtroom described Panetti as duded up in cowboy clothes, prancing around and ranting about Satan, an obsession typical for the psychotically insane.
Perhaps the court anticipated this; calculated that his inevitably demented performance would solidify public opinion against him and thus hasten his convenient disposal via lethal injection. Hey, he was probably faking his craziness anyway, said prosecutors.
The Texas court system, the American court system and many Americans in general are failing the Scott Panettis among us, and they need to educate themselves.
Psychosis is not a condition of choice, like a cocaine high. Nor does it proceed from character flaws. Psychosis arrives in a person's psyche at conception via genetic transmission -- heredity -- and it devours character. It eats away at the circuitry of the prefrontal cortex, the command center of the brain, the regulator of thought, the behavioral choices that proceed from thought, the capacity to separate fantasy from reality.
Schizophrenia, the genetic flaw that produces psychosis, afflicts about one in a 100 Americans, an enormous figure.
Schizophrenia does not always lead to violence. In Panetti's case it did, and on Wednesday, barring a commutation by the Supreme Court or Texas Gov. Rick Perry, he will pay the ultimate price for suffering the ultimate bad luck.
Perhaps our national self-education should begin with some critical soul-searching.
Who would benefit from Panetti's extermination?
Would it protect society? Panetti is already sequestered from society, and should be forever. Would his execution serve as a deterrent? To believe this, you must believe that everyone will wake up on Thursday morning musing, "Gee, look what happened to Scott. I guess I won't turn psychotic after all!"
Would it be a stern reaffirmation of -- of what? Of our righteous national ideal that nobody had better go violently nuts if they know what's good for them?
Would it give comfort? It certainly would not give comfort to Sonja Alvarado, his former wife and the daughter of his victims, who filed a petition stating that because of his paranoid delusions at the time of the murders, he should never have been tried.
Nor would it give comfort to Victoria Panetti, his sister. She has waged a heartfelt national petition campaign to plead for her brother's life. To achieve this, the voices of her petition's signers must break through the moral anesthesia of the powerful pols and judges who have thus far shrugged at the manifest injustice of her brother's case.
Clearly, her prospects are not good. The Supreme Court upheld a 2004 federal judge's stay of execution of Panetti on the ground that a lower court's standard for determining a defendant's mental competency was unconstitutional. That was then.
The Texas court lawyers bulled ahead, getting the case sent back down to that same lower court-- the Fifth Circuit -- to correct "errors" in the prosecution. In 2013, a psychiatrist testified that he thought Panetti was "competent" enough to understand why he was being put down, despite mountainous evidence to the contrary that beggars belief.
So: Let us regretfully, and with apologies to the ravaged sensibilities of Victoria and the other Panetti family members, search for shards of redemption should the worst come to pass Wednesday night. After all, the rationale for executions, if there is a rationale, must be that they will make things ... um ... better.
Will redemption come via a new surge of political backbone to stare down the NRA and strengthen laws to at least keep the mentally ill from possessing firearms? Don't hold your breath.
Will it come via kicking our society out of its denial about the disgraceful chaos of American mental-health care, and make us insist that its reform be a national priority? This has been a crying necessity for generations. So it can probably wait a few generations more.
Will it come via motivating people to enlarge their understanding by getting to know families with members afflicted with the disease? The nearest is not far away, I guarantee you. You will learn about torturous, nearly unbearable grief, and you will keenly perceive the need for compassionate activism. So, probably not.
Speaking honestly, I can envision only one certain consequence of Scott Panetti's execution:
A spiritually declining nation will have shoved the lethal needle a little deeper into its own vein.
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http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/61607/scott-panetti-is-insane-will-gov-perry-dare-spare-him
Scott Panetti is insane: will Gov Perry dare spare him?
Rick Perry would risk looking a wimp just when he needs Republicans to back him for the White House
Charles Laurence, DEC 2, 2014
New York - This Wednesday, Texas plans to carry out its tenth execution so far this year.
The “hang ‘em high” state executes far more men and women than any other: since the death penalty was re-instated by the US Supreme Court in 1976, a national total of 1,392 have died in electric chairs or, more recently, on the cruciform gurneys of death by lethal injection – and 519 of them have been in Texas.
This is the dark side of America. Most of the executions make no more news than a brief headline over an old police mug shot. But every now and then a case comes with a twist that garners national or even international notice.
The condemned might be a woman, or have been a minor when they committed capital murder, or have a case that they really did not do it. (Across America, more than 140 Death Row prisoners in the last 40 years have been found innocent after all.)
Wednesday’s planned execution is special because Scott Panetti, a white man of 56, is completely, hopelessly insane, a cartoon-style schizophrenic with assorted other mental and emotional ailments attached, and has been for years.
This raises the issue of competency. Just as you are meant to be sane enough to understand the charges against you before you face a jury of your peers, so you are meant to be sane enough to understand the connection between your Dead Man’s Walk to the execution chamber, the crime committed, and society’s need to punish and deter.
Panetti was diagnosed schizophrenic when he was 18, soon after he was discharged, honourably, from the Navy. He was hospitalised 13 times between that diagnosis and the day he committed murder in 1992.
One of his alternative personalities, ‘Sarge’ Iron Horse, had him shave his head, don military fatigues, arm himself with a sawn-off shotgun and a hunting rifle, and shoot his parents-in-law, Joe and Amanda Alvarado, at their home, in front of his wife and daughter.
Then he took wife and daughter to his shed, and holed-up there before calling the police. Panetti was persuaded to release the mother and child unharmed. Then he changed into a suit, dress shirt and tie, and surrendered.
His competence was always an issue. At his first competence trial, the jury deadlocked. A second jury was called, and he was found competent to stand trial. In a move which seems to have astonished nearly every lawyer and commentator since, the judge allowed him to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers and conduct his own defence.
This involved his coming to court in a theatrical cowboy costume with purple fringes, complete with Stetson hat. He entered a plea of insanity, which must have been rather obvious. Court records have him slipping into his ‘Sarge’ persona as he described the murder, the climax coming with him pointing his fingers, gun-style, at the jurors and shouting out: “Boom, boom, boom!”
He asked to call 200 witnesses, including Jesus and President John F Kennedy.
The prosecution argued that what they saw as theatrics were irrelevant: Panetti had murdered and all he needed to understand to make him “competent” for trial was that he had been charged with committing a crime. The jury agreed. He was sentenced to death, the appeals process began and the clock began to tick on his 20-year sojourn on Texas’ Death Row.
Panetti became the poster-boy for the issue of when a criminal is too mad to be executed when his case arrived before the US Supreme Court in 2007. The Justices ruled that the Texas courts had made “too narrow” an interpretation of competency. The condemned person, they said, must have a “rational understanding” of why the state plans to kill him or her.
But all the Court did was send the case back to the Texas state appeal courts, which ruled once again that Panetti was competent, and should die. This time, the Supreme Court let it go.
Last week, the New York Times argued in a leader under the headline ‘Will Texas Kill an Insane Man?’ that the Supreme Court had failed by refusing to overturn Panetti’s sentence or writing a full definition of competency.
The paper also pointed out that Panetti was one of 350,000 prison inmates who have been diagnosed as mentally ill, ten times the number of the insane who are in secure hospitals. The lack of health care for the mad is a major reason that there are so many in prison.
“A civilised society should not be in the business of executing anybody,” the Times concluded. “But it certainly cannot pretend to be adhering to any morally acceptable standard of culpability if it kills someone like Scott Panetti.”
The Times has long called for abolition. It is the newspaper of the “liberal elite”, and the death penalty is one of those issues that divide Red states from Blue, and the South from the North. Thirty-two states have the death penalty, 18 do not.
For years, the more the “liberal elite” have objected to the death penalty, the more Texas, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana, the states with the busiest death chambers, have clung to their “states’ rights” to kill whom they please.
But there are signs that may be changing.
The Texas Star-Telegram took the unusual step last week of declaring that ‘Scott Panetti Should Not Be Executed’.
“Whether or not Texas carries out Panetti’s execution on Wednesday, there will have been fewer state executions in Texas this year than in almost two decades. It’s clear the appetite for capital punishment is waning,” it wrote in a leader.
“Even those who support the death penalty should see that little good can come of executing a man so delusional he cannot truly appreciate his crime or understand its connection to his fate.
“If the courts will not stay his execution, Gov. Rick Perry should.”
That would offer a transformative moment. Perry has signed more death warrants than any governor in modern history – more even than his predecessor, Gov George W Bush - and in the Red state culture of the South and the Republican Right, hanging ‘em high is a display of virility and even of Christian righteousness.
A stay seems even less likely given that Politico has just reported that Perry is spending this week meeting groups of Texan and Republican power-brokers and fund-raisers to prepare his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
What would they make of a wimp ready to spare a guilty man?
Panetti seems to have accepted his fate. He told his lawyer that he did indeed understand why he was to die: he was caught in a war between good and evil, and Satan had guided the prison warders to kill him to silence the Word of Jesus, which it was his mission to spread on Death Row. ·
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-jeff-hood/killer-christians-in-texa_b_6245284.html
Killer Christians in Texas: The Next Victim is Scott Panetti
By Rev. Jeff Hood, December 1, 2014
Has your church ever executed someone? Don’t be appalled by such a question. Think deeper. Perhaps you never hung someone on the cross at the front of your sanctuary, but have you considered the consequences of your inaction? Think about all the times your church could have done something to save a life and didn’t. Can’t think of any? Christians in Texas should have no problem.
Texas has one of the largest populations of Christians in the nation. With a statistic like that, one might be surprised to note that Texas also executes more people than any other state. If Texas were a nation, it would be amongst the top executing nations on earth. With Christians comprising a stunning majority of people who live here, there is no ability to blame what is happening in my state on any other faith except my own. Christians are killing people.
From the governor to the attorney general, to state legislators, to judges, to the district attorneys, to the jurors, to the prison guards, to a whole host of others, the majority of those directly involved in the process of executing someone in this state are actually Christians. In light of this fact, I have worked over the last few years to get churches organized and talking about abolishing the death penalty. I ask the same question every time, “Would you be interested in hosting a conversation about the death penalty?” More often than not, I hear the same response, “That is too political for our congregation.” When a mass movement of Christians could quickly stop the death penalty in Texas, silence remains the primary tool of execution.
The State of Texas is scheduled to execute Scott Panetti on December 3 and Christians will be his primary killers. The barbarism of our crime is exacerbated by the fact that Panetti has suffered from documented mental illness for over 30 years. From being institutionalized over and over again, to being classified as disabled by the Social Security Administration, to shooting his in-laws to death, to dressing up as a cowboy to represent himself at trial, to now thinking that he is being executed for preaching and proselytizing, Panetti is very sick.
In Matthew 25, there was a man named Jesus from Nazareth who was also very sick and said that we would be judged by how we treat the sick. With just a short time to go before such an injustice is carried out, one would expect the noise coming from Texas churches to be deafening. The truth be known, most churches don’t even know an execution is about to be carried out. When did we stop caring about the least of these? When did we stop talking about loving our neighbors as our self? When did we become killer Christians?
Just the other day, I drove by an old country church with a sign out front that read, “The Judgment is Upon Us.” I know this to be true. We cannot continue to execute God’s children and expect the results to be positive for the future of our people.
On December 2, I will start a vigil outside the execution chamber in Huntsville, Texas. During the vigil, I will pray that we will be a people who will turn from our wicked ways, spare the life of Scott Panetti and call upon God to heal our land. In this most holy time of year, I ask that you join me.
Amen.
Rev. Jeff Hood is a theologian, historian, and bioethicist, who recently completed his doctorate in theology at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. An ordained Southern Baptist minister on the staff of the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, Jeff also serves on the board of directors of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the National Council of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and as a spiritual advisor on Texas’ Death Row
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/us/justices-urged-to-intervene-in-execution-of-texas-man.html?_r=0
Justices Urged to Intervene in Execution of Texas Man
By David Montgomery, December 1, 2014
AUSTIN, Tex. — On Sept. 8, 1992, Scott Panetti shaved his head, dressed in Army fatigues and killed his wife’s parents with a deer rifle as his horrified wife and daughter looked on. Mr. Panetti represented himself at his subsequent trial, wearing a cowboy costume with a purple bandanna while trying to call more than 200 witnesses, including the pope, John F. Kennedy and Jesus.
On Monday, with Mr. Panetti, 56, facing a Wednesday execution date for the murders, his lawyers urged the United States Supreme Court to intervene on the grounds that putting a mentally ill person to death is unconstitutional and violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. They contend that he has suffered from schizophrenia for more than three decades, and the case has gained national attention as a test for issues surrounding the execution of the mentally ill.
His legal team also appealed to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, seeking a 30-day stay of execution after the State Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7 to 0 against the lawyers’ request to commute Mr. Panetti’s death sentence. Under Texas law, Mr. Perry cannot commute the sentence without a recommendation by the Pardons and Paroles Board, but lawyers say a monthlong reprieve by Mr. Perry would give them additional time to show that their client is not competent to be executed.
Attorney General Greg Abbott, who will replace Mr. Perry as governor in January, represents the state in seeking to uphold the 1995 capital conviction in Kerrville, Tex. And a former governor — Mark White, who held office in the 1980s — is among scores of political figures, legal scholars and religious leaders who are siding with Mr. Panetti’s lawyers in their effort to block the execution.
Mr. Panetti is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. on Wednesday unless his legal team is able to gain more time. Texas has executed 518 inmates since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, by far the largest number of any state. Oklahoma has the second highest number, 111.
The case has drawn an outcry not only from death penalty opponents, but from others who say the execution of a mentally ill person who may not have been aware of his or her own actions crosses a legal threshold that is clearly in violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
“Widespread and diverse voices agree that Mr. Panetti’s execution would cross a moral line and serve no retributive or deterrent value,” said Kathryn Kase, Mr. Panetti’s lead lawyer and executive director of the Texas Defender Service, which represents people facing the death penalty.
The state, however, contends in legal filings that conversations between Mr. Panetti and his parents, secretly taped by prison officials, “provide conclusive evidence that Panetti has a rational understanding of the relationship between his crime and his punishment,” and that he “has been grossly exaggerating his symptoms while being observed.”
“Panetti knows that he killed his in-laws, while his wife and child looked on, and he knows that he has been sentenced to die for that crime,” Mr. Abbott’s office said.
According to his lawyers, Mr. Panetti first received a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder in 1978, 14 years before killing his in-laws. He was hospitalized 13 times from 1978 to 1991, and in 1986 expressed “fears that the devil is after him,” according to a timeline by his lawyers.
His condition deteriorated further in the early 1990s, according to legal documents, when he failed to take prescribed antipsychotic medication and discontinued treatment at a Kerrville hospital. At one point, he brandished a cavalry sword, called himself “Sgt. Iron Horse” and asserted that residents of Fredericksburg, where he lived, were plotting against him.
His wife and 3-year-old daughter moved out, and afterward, Mr. Panetti armed himself with a sawed-off shotgun and a deer rifle, and went to his in-laws’ home, killing his wife’s parents, Joe and Amanda Alvarado. He then took his wife and daughter to a bunkhouse where he had been living. He released them unharmed in a standoff with the police, according to court documents, then changed into a suit and surrendered.
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Texas parole board refuses condemned inmate
December 01, 2014
HOUSTON (AP) -- The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously has refused to delay this week's scheduled execution of an inmate whose attorneys contend is too delusional for the death penalty.
Board spokesman Raymond Estrada says the panel voted 7-0 Monday, rejecting a call from lawyers for 56-year-old Scott Panetti to put off his execution for 180 days or recommend to Gov. Rick Perry that Panetti's death sentence be commuted to life.
Panetti is set to die Wednesday in Huntsville for the shooting deaths of his in-laws in 1992 at their home in the Texas Hill Country.
Lawyers say Panetti is severely mentally ill. They sought the board's reprieve to further examine whether he's competent for execution.
Panetti's attorneys also are appealing to a federal appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
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US Supreme Court asked to halt execution of Texas inmate who lawyers say is too mentally ill
By Mike Graczyk, December 1, 2014
HOUSTON — Attorneys who contend a condemned Texas inmate set to die this week is too delusional for execution asked the U.S. Supreme Court Monday to halt his lethal injection and determine whether mentally ill people should be exempt from the death penalty because it is unconstitutionally cruel punishment.
Scott Panetti, 56, is set for lethal injection Wednesday for the 1992 shooting deaths of his in-laws at their home in Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country.
There was "no doubt" Panetti was severely mentally ill "before, during and after the crime for which he has been sentenced to death," attorneys Gregory Wiercioch and Kathryn Kase told the justices. "And Mr. Panetti's mental state has further deteriorated since his last evaluation in 2007."
Panetti, a Hayward, Wisconsin, native, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978 and had been hospitalized more than a dozen times for treatment in the decade before killing Joe and Amanda Alvarado, his estranged wife's parents.
Justices in 2002 prohibited the execution of people who are mentally impaired, deciding it violated the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But they have allowed capital punishment for mentally ill prisoners as long as the inmate has a factual and rational understanding of why he's being put to death.
The "rational understanding" provision was added by the Supreme Court in a 2007 ruling on an appeal from Panetti. Records indicate his case has gone to the Supreme Court at least five times since his 1995 conviction and sentence.
"Imposition of the death penalty on people with severe mental illness, as with people with intellectual disability, does not serve the two goals of deterrence and retribution because of their reduced moral culpability," Panetti's lawyers argued to the high court Monday.
Another appeal for Panetti pending before a federal appeals court seeks an execution delay for additional competency evaluations.
While his medical records contain indications of mental illness, they "strongly indicate rational awareness of his impending execution and the reason for it," Ellen Stewart-Klein, an assistant Texas attorney general, told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
"Panetti's mental status has at best been severely exaggerated by his counsel," she said.
Also Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles refused a petition from Panetti's lawyers to delay his execution for 180 days or recommend to Republican Gov. Rick Perry that Panetti's death sentence be commuted to life, board spokesman Raymond Estrada said.
At his trial, Panetti "wore the garish costume of a dime-store cowboy as he represented himself" and "engaged in bizarre, incoherent and frightening behavior," his attorneys said.
His trial judge ruled he could be his own lawyer and appointed a standby attorney whom Panetti never consulted except to call as a witness during the trial's punishment phase.
No court has ruled Panetti was or is incompetent or insane.
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'Delusional' Killer Scott Panetti Asks Supreme Court to Halt Execution
Tracy Connor, December 1, 2014
A Texas death-row inmate who represented himself at trial — wearing a cartoonish cowboy suit and trying to subpoena the pope — is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his Wednesday execution on the grounds that he has severe mental illness. Lower courts have narrowly rejected a series of appeals by Scott Panetti, who admits he killed his in-laws in 1995. His lawyers now want the high court to declare that his execution would violate the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
After the Texas parole board rejected Panetti's bid to have his sentence commuted to life, his lawyers on Monday filed a reprieve letter with Gov. Rick Perry asking him to issue a 30-day stay so their client can "demonstrate that he is not competent for execution."
Prosecution experts have suggested that Panetti is faking, but defense lawyers have detailed mental problems that predate the killing, bizarre behavior during his trial, and his current "delusion" that Satan is orchestrating his lethal injection to punish him for jailhouse preaching. "Executing Scott Panetti now — without at least pausing to consider whether such an execution offends contemporary standards of decency — will irreparably harm public confidence in the administration of the death penalty," his lawyers wrote.
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http://time.com/3612677/scott-panetti-texas-execution-schizophrenia/
Texas Plans to Execute a Schizophrenic Man Who Tried to Subpoena Jesus
By Josh Sanburn, December 1, 2014
Scott Panetti, who is scheduled to die Wednesday, has a long history of severe mental illness
In 1992, Scott Panetti shaved his head, dressed himself in camo and fatally shot his in-laws in front of his wife and daughter. Afterward, he put on a suit and surrendered to police.
At his trial, Panetti wore a cowboy costume and acted as his own lawyer, waiving his right to counsel. He applied for 200 subpoenas that included John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ. He asked prospective jurors whether they had any Indian blood in them. His opening statement referenced demons. And he referred to himself as Sergeant Iron Horse when he confessed to killing his wife’s parents. It wasn’t Scott who killed them, he said. It was Sarge.
Panetti’s defense appeared to be that of a seriously ill man. And by most accounts, he was. First diagnosed with early schizophrenia in 1978, Panetti had been in and out of a dozen mental hospitals over 14 years, regularly determined to have paranoia, depression, delusions and hallucinations and eventually deemed disabled by the Social Security Administration, qualifying him for monthly benefits before he turned 30. Since that first diagnosis, Panetti came to see life as a cosmic battle between good and evil, one in which he—or Sarge, or the other voices in his head—played a role.
In one instance, Panetti’s first wife came home to find that he had buried his furniture in the front yard because he believed he needed to purge Satan from the objects. In an affidavit, she said she believed her husband should be involuntarily committed and that he had become “obsessed with the idea that the devil was in our house.” Panetti’s explanation for killing the parents of his second wife was similar, according to his lawyers and court documents: the shootings were “Sarge’s” attempt to get rid of the devil he believed was inside his in-laws.
In 1995, a jury found Panetti guilty and sentenced him to death. That sentence comes due Wednesday, when Panetti is scheduled to die by lethal injection. To some, it will be justice finally being served. But to Panetti’s lawyers and other supporters, the planned execution is unconstitutional, and evidence of a capital punishment system in dire need of reform.
Panetti’s attorneys are appealing to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a last-minute stay of execution, arguing that Panetti doesn’t understand he’s being executed for the double murder. They say Panetti hasn’t been given a competency hearing in seven years, and they believe his mental state has deteriorated since then. Panetti’s attorneys are challenging an earlier denial by an appeals court to hold a competency hearing, while also seeking a stay of execution from the Supreme Court on the grounds that putting to death someone who is mentally ill is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
So far, courts haven’t been receptive to those arguments. Several witnesses for the state of Texas have testified that Panetti is competent and has an understanding of his crime. The state has provided hours of audio recordings of Panetti discussing the murders in which he “spoke rationally, demonstrated a fairly sophisticated understanding of his case, and discussed in an intelligent manner the death penalty and its moral implications,” according to court documents.
Kathryn Kase, executive director of the Texas Defender Service who is representing Panetti, questions those accounts and says that his history with mental illness alone should be enough to prevent him from being executed.
“This is not a situation where a guy gets admitted to a hospital once and comes out and commits a crime,” Kase says. “These were multiple hospital admissions over a 12-year period. This is a pretty astonishing and well-documented history of mental illness. Nobody exists for 36 years like this in an effort to get off the hook of criminal responsibility.”
Dozens of mental health professionals and organizations have come out in support of clemency for Panetti, including the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Mental Health America. But time is running out.
Panetti would be the 11th inmate executed in Texas this year, the most of any state. For years, Texas has killed more death row inmates than any other state.
Kase, who visited Panetti a couple weeks ago, says his mental health is worsening, possibly due to stress related to the upcoming execution date.
“He is extremely paranoid, and he is delusional,” Kase says. “And these delusions are that the prison wants to kill him to prevent him from preaching the gospel on death row or telling others about corruption at TDCJ [the Texas Department of Criminal Justice]. We’re not psychologists. We’re not mental health professionals. But we do know we’re seeing something really terrible happen.”
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Texas Governor Rick Perry Asked to Stop Scott Panneti’s Execution
By Meg Kissinger, December 1, 2014
Houston — Scott Panetti is running out of options.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously Monday to deny his appeal to have his sentence commuted to life in prison. His execution by lethal injection is set for 6 p.m. Wednesday at the state prison in Huntsville.
Panetti, 56, shot and killed his wife's parents, Joe and Amanda Alvarado, in Fredericksburg, Texas, in 1992 during a psychotic delusion. Panetti was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978 and was hospitalized 15 times over the next 14 years. His case has drawn international attention from mental health and human rights advocates who say executing Panetti would be a violation of the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Panetti, a native of Hayward, Wis., was allowed to represent himself at trial. He wore a cowboy costume and tried to subpoena Jesus Christ, the pope and John F. Kennedy.
Panetti's volunteer lawyers filed a request with Gov. Rick Perry asking for a reprieve. The lawyers also have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to stay his execution.
There was "no doubt" Panetti was severely mentally ill "before, during and after the crime for which he has been sentenced to death," attorneys Gregory Wiercioch and Kathryn Kase told the justices. "And Mr. Panetti's mental state has further deteriorated since his last evaluation in 2007."
Justices in 2002 prohibited the execution of people who are mentally impaired, deciding it violated the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But they have allowed capital punishment for mentally ill prisoners as long as the inmate has a factual and rational understanding of why he's being put to death.
The "rational understanding" provision was added by the Supreme Court in a 2007 ruling on an appeal from Panetti. Records indicate his case has gone to the Supreme Court at least five times since his 1995 conviction and sentence.
"Imposition of the death penalty on people with severe mental illness, as with people with intellectual disability, does not serve the two goals of deterrence and retribution because of their reduced moral culpability," Panetti's lawyers argued to the high court Monday.
Another appeal for Panetti pending before a federal appeals court seeks an execution delay for additional competency evaluations.
While his medical records contain indications of mental illness, they "strongly indicate rational awareness of his impending execution and the reason for it," Ellen Stewart-Klein, an assistant Texas attorney general, told the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
"Panetti's mental status has at best been severely exaggerated by his counsel," she said.
At his trial, Panetti "wore the garish costume of a dime-store cowboy as he represented himself" and "engaged in bizarre, incoherent and frightening behavior," his attorneys said.
His trial judge ruled he could be his own lawyer and appointed a standby attorney whom Panetti never consulted except to call as a witness during the trial's punishment phase.
No court has ruled Panetti was or is incompetent or insane.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/01/rick-perry-scott-panetti_n_6250360.html
Conservatives Call On Rick Perry To Halt Execution Of Scott Panetti
By Amanda Terkel, December 1, 2014
WASHINGTON -- A group of conservative leaders is mounting a last-minute effort to stop Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) from executing inmate Scott Panetti, arguing that killing "one of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners on death row in the United States" would "undermine the public's faith in a fair and moral justice system."
Panetti admitted in 1995 to having killed his in-laws three years earlier, while his wife and three-year-old daughter watched. He has suffered from schizophrenia and other mental illnesses for over 30 years and has been hospitalized on 15 separate occasions. In spite of his illness, Panetti is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday at 6 p.m. CST.
Twenty-one conservative leaders have joined with mental health and death penalty reformers in opposing the execution, asking Perry in a recent letter to commute Panetti's sentence to life in prison. Signatories included former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, conservative activist Brent Bozell and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer.
Each of us has been active at the national level of the conservative movement for many years, and no one could accuse us of being soft on crime. Among conservatives there is much debate about the effectiveness and the morality of the death penalty. Some crimes are so terrible, and committed with such clear malice, that some believe that execution seems the only appropriate and proportional response. But Scott Panetti’s is no such case. [...]
The authority to take a man’s life is the most draconian penalty that we allow our government to exercise. As conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought. It would be immoral for the government to take this man’s life. Should the Board recommend it, we respectfully urge you to reduce Mr. Panetti’s death sentence to life in prison.
According to The Atlantic, Panetti had come to believe he was engaged in a battle with Satan and tried to exorcise his home by burying his furniture in the backyard. At his trial, he dressed as a cowboy and acted as his own attorney. He also tried to subpoena John F. Kennedy and the Pope.
Prosecutors have argued that Panetti is faking his illness.
Panetti's lawyers filed a motion this month asking Perry to stay the execution for 30 days in order for Panetti to receive a new mental health assessment. (He has not had one since 2007.) The lawyers said they would have filed the request earlier, but no one notified them that an execution date had been set. Instead, they had to learn about it from a newspaper article.
Unlike in other states, Perry can't single-handedly reduce Panetti's sentence -- the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has to first recommend clemency. On Monday, however, the board unanimously voted against delaying Panetti's execution for 180 days and recommending to Perry that his sentence be commuted.
Perry's office did not immediately return a request for comment on whether the governor agreed with the board's decision or on whether he was considering a 30-day stay.
More than 93,000 people have signed an online petition asking Perry to grant Panetti clemency. He also has the support of his ex-wife and former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).
Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist, wrote in a recent Dallas Morning News op-ed that opposing Panetti's execution is a pro-life position.
"A fundamental tenet of the pro-life ethic is that all life has value and we are called to protect it, especially in its most vulnerable forms. A culture of life recognizes the value of those who are vulnerable and prioritizes safeguarding them," she wrote.
"By setting an execution date for Panetti, Texas is going entirely contrary to what we expect in a society that truly values life," Johnson added. "This proposed execution shows a troubling disregard toward the reality of mental illness and protecting those who suffer from it."
Mother Jones reporter Stephanie Mencimer noted that it's "unusual for conservative Christians to support a clemency petition like Panetti's." In 1998, conservatives tried to get then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush to stop the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, who had converted to Christianity in prison. (Bush went ahead with the execution.)
But this case is different.
"[Panetti's] religious fervor is the product of a brain disorder, and the evangelicals' opposition to his execution is not related to his religious proclamations," wrote Mencimer. "It is more of a reflection of the shift in public attitudes regarding capital punishment that has been driven by the growing number of exonerations of death row inmates, the high number of mentally ill and disabled people sentenced to die, and the inefficient and expensive administration of capital punishment."
Heather Beaudoin, coordinator of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, told Mencimer that the Panetti case was "the largest outpouring of support on a death penalty case we've seen from evangelicals," and the first time she was aware of Paul personally speaking out against an execution.
If Texas goes ahead with the scheduled execution, Panetti would be the 519th person to die by lethal injection in the state since 1982.
Read the full letter below:
November 25, 2014
The Honorable Rick Perry
Office of the Governor
P. O. Box 12428
Austin, Texas 78711
Dear Governor Perry:
We respectfully ask you to commute Scott Panetti’s death sentence to life in prison if the Board of Pardons and Paroles recommends it. Mr. Panetti is one of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners on death row in the United States. Rather than serving as a measured response to murder, the execution of Mr. Panetti would only serve to undermine the public’s faith in a fair and moral justice system.
Each of us has been active at the national level of the conservative movement for many years, and no one could accuse us of being soft on crime. Among conservatives there is much debate about the effectiveness and the morality of the death penalty. Some crimes are so terrible, and committed with such clear malice, that some believe that execution seems the only appropriate and proportional response. But Scott Panetti’s is no such case.
Panetti has a documented history of mental illness going back to when he was 20 years old. In the subsequent decades he has been involuntarily hospitalized on fourteen separate occasions. His diagnoses include chronic schizophrenia, paranoia, hallucinations and fragmented personality, for which he was prescribed high doses of powerful psychiatric drugs for schizophrenia. He was termed manic and delusional. He heard voices and thought he was controlled by an unseen power. Panetti once nailed the curtains shut in his house to seal out the devil. It is clear that he has been suffering from severe mental illness since long before he committed the offense that landed him on death row.
In 1986, for example, Panetti believed he was engaged in spiritual warfare with Satan and he was convinced that the devil was in his home, leading his wife to sign an affidavit to have him involuntarily committed. She testified that he attempted to exorcize his home with a series of inexplicable behaviors, including burying his furniture in the backyard. Bizarre manifestations of his illness continued – virtually unabated – right up until the tragic day on which he killed his wife’s parents in 1992.
Despite this long record of mental illness, Panetti was found competent to be tried and to waive his right to counsel. Incredibly the Texas trial court allowed this delusional man to present his own “defense”. His courtroom behavior was bizarre. He wore a costume of a purple cowboy suit and bandana to the trial. He picked one juror with the flip of a coin. He attempted to subpoena over 200 witnesses including John Kennedy, the Pope, and Jesus Christ. He slept through some of the testimony.
This was no act cooked up to get him off of murder charges. His severe mental illness is thoroughly documented in his medical records. And his delusions persist. Now, just days away from his scheduled execution, Panetti continues to suffer from the manifestations of his mental illness, believing that he will be executed for preaching the Gospels to his fellow prisoners, not for the murder of his in-laws.
The authority to take a man’s life is the most draconian penalty that we allow our government to exercise. As conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought. It would be immoral for the government to take this man’s life. Should the Board recommend it, we respectfully urge you to reduce Mr. Panetti’s death sentence to life in prison.
Sincerely,
Brent Bozell, President, For America
Ken Cuccinelli, President, Senate Conservatives Fund
Dave Keene, Opinion Editor, The Washington Times
Pat Nolan, Director Center for Criminal Justice Reform, the American Conservative Union Foundation
Richard Viguerie, Chairman, ConservativeHQ.com
Ron Robinson, President, Young America’s Foundation
Jim Miller, Budget Director for President Ronald Reagan
Craig Shirley, Reagan Biographer
C. Preston Noell, III, President, Tradition, Family, Property, Inc.
Rebecca Hagelin, Columnist, The Washington Times
Floyd Brown, President, Western Center for Journalism
Charles Murray, WH Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Patrick A. Trueman, Attorney At Law
Mark L. Earley, Sr., Former Attorney General of Virginia and
Former President and CEO of Prison Fellowship USA
Morton Blackwell, Chairman, The Weyrich Lunch
James L. Martin, Chairman, 60 Plus Association
Tricia Erickson, President, Angel Pictures and Publicity
Maggie Gallagher, Author
Diana L. Banister, President, Shirley & Banister Public Affairs
Mark Fitzgibbons, President of Corporate Affairs, American Target Advertising
Gary L. Bauer, President, American Values
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http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/will-texas-execute-scott-panetti/383285/
Will Texas Execute a Mentally Ill Man?
Scott Panetti's imminent execution highlights deep, systemic flaws in the death penalty.
NANCY LEONG AND JUSTIN MARCEAU, DEC 1 2014
Scott Panetti is scheduled for execution in Texas on December 3, 2014. His attorneys found out when they read it in the newspaper. Although the execution date has been set two weeks earlier, the state provided his attorneys with no notice. This shortcoming was only the latest in a long series of disturbing events surrounding Panetti’s trial, conviction, and death sentence.
Panetti has suffered from schizophrenia and other mental illness for over thirty years. He first exhibited signs of a psychotic disorder as a teenager. Beginning in 1978, he was hospitalized for mental illness on fifteen separate occasions. He developed a delusion that he was engaged in spiritual warfare with Satan. He tried to exorcize his home by burying furniture in the backyard because, he claimed, the devil was in it. He was involuntarily committed after swinging a sword at his wife and daughter and threatening to kill them.
In 1992, Panetti went off his medication, shaved his head, and dressed in camouflage fatigues. He went to his in-laws house and murdered his mother and father-in-law in front of his wife and daughter.
At his trial, Panetti wore a cowboy costume and subpoenaed John F. Kennedy and the Pope.
The subsequent trial and sentencing bordered on the unbelievable. Panetti was allowed to represent himself during both the guilt and penalty phases of the proceedings. He wore a cowboy costume and a purple bandana to court. He attempted to subpoena John F. Kennedy, the Pope, and Jesus Christ, among 200 others. His statements were rambling and incoherent. He fell asleep during trial. While describing the shooting, he assumed the personality of a character he called “Sarge” and narrated the events in the third person. He pointed an imaginary rifle at jurors, visibly frightening them. His stand-by attorney called the trial a “judicial farce.”
Unsurprisingly, a jury convicted Panetti of murder. After calling only one witness—his stand-by counsel—at the penalty phase of his trial, the jury sentenced Panetti to death after only one day of deliberation.
As with many individuals on death row, a long series of appeals followed, focusing on Panetti’s mental illness. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Panetti’s petition for review, and Texas courts have thus far declined to grant a stay of execution to allow time for an assessment of his competency for execution. Panetti has not received a competency evaluation in nearly seven years.
No one could dispute that Panetti’s actions were atrocious beyond words. The death of two innocent people is an unspeakable tragedy. But the execution of a man grievously afflicted by mental illness for three decades would in no way compensate for the murder of his in-laws.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1986 case called Ford v. Wainwright, prohibited the execution of people who are so out of touch with reality that they do not know right from wrong and cannot understand their punishment or the purpose of it. Panetti’s attorneys argue that this holding applies to him. His severe mental illness causes him to believe that Satan, working through the state of Texas, is seeking to execute him for preaching the Gospel—and, therefore, he cannot possess a rational understanding of the link between his crime and his punishment. To most people, Panetti’s lengthy history of mental illness and his bizarre behavior strongly suggest that Ford should prevent his execution. Yet in practice, Ford’s guarantee is often compromised when courts refuse to order mental health evaluations in a timely fashion, as Panetti’s seven years without a competency evaluation illustrate all too clearly.
His imminent execution reveals just one of many reasons the death penalty in its current form is profoundly flawed. Across the country, the death penalty is administered in a wildly arbitrary way among offenders who have committed similar crimes. For example, one of us found in recent research that while the death penalty was an option in approximately 92 percent of all first-degree murders during one decade in Colorado, it was sought by the prosecution in only three percent of those killings and obtained in only 0.6 percent of cases. And Colorado is hardly unique. Justice administered so unevenly is no justice at all.
Scholars and experts believe problems with the death penalty render it constitutionally infirm.
Likewise, the recent botched executions of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma and Joseph Wood in Arizona show that the methods of execution are both cruel and unusual. Executioners lack basic training, shortages of drugs previously used in executions have led states to experiment with different lethal injection cocktails, and courts have prevented attorneys for those sentenced to die from accessing information about the details of an upcoming execution.
Massive procedural irregularities compound these problems. A recent series by the Marshall Project exposed how death row inmates often lose their cases simply because they miss filing deadlines, often as the result of their attorneys’ incompetence. Such attorneys include a recently-disbarred lawyer who dressed as Thomas Jefferson at his own disbarment proceeding. In many instances, they forfeit strong claims of factual innocence, juror misconduct, or compromised trial proceedings. Other systemic issues, ranging from a perennial shortage of public defenders to racial bias in death sentences, continue to plague capital proceedings.
Many scholars and experts believe that these and other problems with the death penalty render it constitutionally infirm. But many who do not oppose the death penalty altogether still oppose Panetti’s execution. A broad and diverse coalition has urged Governor Rick Perry to commute Panetti’s death sentence to life in prison, including the American Psychiatric Association, former Texas Governor Mark White, more than fifty Evangelical leaders from around Texas and the United States, the American Bar Association, ten Texas state legislators, former U.S. Representative Ron Paul, and the European Union.
But on Tuesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Panetti’s emergency request for stay of execution in a splintered 5-4 decision. A dissent by Judge Elsa Alcala wrote, “[T]his Court, at best, deprives appellant of a fair opportunity to litigate his claims, thereby violating the constitutionally required procedural protections recognized in Ford. At words, this Court’s decision will result in the irreversible and constitutionally impermissible execution of a mentally incompetent person.”
After the Court’s decision, Governor Perry may indeed be Panetti’s best hope for clemency. The question, then, is whether Governor Perry will recognize that executing someone who understands neither his crime nor the punishment for it makes a mockery of justice.
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https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/01/a-plea-from-the-right
A Plea from the Right
Conservative stalwarts urge Texas to spare Scott Panetti.
By MAURICE CHAMMAH, December 1, 2014
As an execution approaches, attorneys for the condemned always submit a flurry of legal filings, calls for clemency, and appeals for public support. In Texas, which employs the death penalty more than any other state, these appeals get little public attention beyond the most committed of anti-death penalty activists.The case of Scott Panetti, a mentally ill inmate who is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, is proving to be an exception. Efforts to stop his execution are finding support from an unusual corner: More than 20 conservative leaders have signed a letter to Texas Gov. Rick Perry asking him to commute Panetti’s sentence to life in prison.
For more on the Panetti case, read our earlier story. The move to save Panetti, disclosed by the participants today, raises the question of whether a recent conservative campaign for criminal justice reform may move into hot-button issues like the death penalty, traditionally an area where widespread public support and deep divisions within the right have kept many conservative leaders on the sidelines.
Undermining the public's faith in the justice system (pg 1)
“Among conservatives there is much debate about the effectiveness and the morality of the death penalty,” the letter to Perry said. “Some crimes are so terrible, and committed with such clear malice, that some believe that execution seems the only appropriate and proportional response. But Scott Panetti’s is no such case.”Panetti has a 30-year history of documented mental illness. Although prosecutors and doctors for the state have convinced multiple judges that Panetti may be faking his symptoms to avoid execution, these conservatives are not convinced. “This was no act cooked up to get him off of murder charges,” the letter reads.Several of the names on the letter are associated with the Right on Crime movement, a group of conservatives who have pushed state legislatures and the federal government to reduce incarceration and reform sentencing laws. So far these mainstream conservatives, including Pat Nolan of the American Conservative Union Foundation, and Richard Viguerie of ConservativeHQ.com, have focused on criminal justice reform in part as a means of saving taxpayer money and what Newt Gingrich has called “lost human potential.”Underlying the movement, however, is also an element of evangelical Christian compassion, which has been mobilized in the past in support of stopping an execution. In 1998, Karla Faye Tucker — who committed a particularly brutal stabbing of two people with a pickax before undergoing a religious conversion while on death row — became a cause among evangelical figures. Pat Robertson championed her case on The 700 Club.
"We must be on guard..." (pg 2)
As with the Tucker execution, Panetti’s conservative supporters are using the language of morality not to oppose the death penalty as a whole, but to take issue with specific executions — like those of the mentally ill — about which they have moral qualms. “As conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought,” the letter reads. “It would be immoral for the government to take this man’s life.”Nolan, a longtime prison reformer now based at the American Conservative Union Foundation, said the signatories included both death penalty abolitionists like himself and death penalty supporters who found the Panetti case beyond the pale. While the letter was narrowly drawn, he said, it may open the way to a broader debate that conservatives have avoided – at least in public.“For those of us that are troubled by the death penalty, it’s a chance to go to those who defend the death penalty and say, ‘Can you justify executing this man?’” Nolan said. “We think the next step is to say, ‘How can we support a system that allows an outcome like this?’”Even before today’s letter, a handful of conservatives like Ron Paul and the evangelical lawyer Jay Sekulow came out in support of clemency for Panetti. This letter, however, suggests a spread to the mainstream of the conservative community. That spread was further bolstered last week when Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Tom Price wrote in a dissent to the court’s decision to let the Panetti execution proceed that he no longer supported the death penalty at all. “Based on my specialized knowledge of this process, I now conclude that the death penalty as a form of punishment should be abolished,” he wrote, “because the execution of individuals does not appear to measurably advance the retribution and deterrence purposes served by the death penalty.”In practical terms, the efforts to save Panetti’s life face steep odds. Texas Gov. Rick Perry can issue a stay to keep Panetti from being executed on Wednesday, but he cannot commute the sentence unless he receives a favorable recommendation from the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles. It is extremely rare for the board -- whose members are all Perry appointees – to recommend clemency.
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http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/12/texas-board-pardons-rejects-clemency-scott-panetti
Despite Conservatives' Pleas, Texas Board Rejects Clemency for Mentally Ill Convict
—By Stephanie Mencimer| Mon Dec. 1, 2014
Today the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole voted 7-0 against recommending clemency for Scott Panetti, a severely mentally ill death row inmate who is now infamous for having represented himself at trial wearing a purple cowboy suit.
Panetti, first diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978, was convicted of capital murder after he shaved his head, donned camo fatigues and shot his in-laws in 1992 in a psychotic rage. But today, not even his victims think he should be executed. His ex-wife has said publicly that she believes he is deeply sick and should be spared. In the past month, a host of prominent conservatives and evangelicals have joined with death penalty opponents, mental health groups, the European Union, the nation of Bulgaria, a former Texas governor, libertarian cult figure Ron Paul, and myriad others who have called on the board and Texas governor Rick Perry to spare Panetti. But even that wasn't enough to sway the governor-appointed board.
The decision means that Panetti's last real hope of avoiding execution on Wednesday lies with the US Supreme Court. Texas law doesn't give the governor independent authority to commute a sentence unless the pardons board recommends such a move—although Perry could order a one-time 30-day delay. Every Texas court that has heard Panetti's appeals in recent weeks has ruled against him, despite powerful dissents from conservative Republican judges.
With the execution less than 48 hours away, Panetti's lawyers have filed two petitions with the high court asking the justices to halt the execution and review the case to determine whether executing the mentally ill violates the Eighth Amendment. They also argue that Panetti hasn't had a mental competency hearing in seven years, and that his mental state has deteriorated significantly during that time. (He now apparently believes there's a listening device implanted in his tooth, for instance.)
This is a similar issue to the one that won Panetti a reprieve in 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled that he hadn't been afforded due process in assessing his competency to be executed. (A previous Supreme Court ruling bans use of the death penalty on people who can't understand the nature of their punishment.) The 2007 decision gave Panetti the right to a hearing on his mental competency, but it didn't do him much good. Even though Panetti still believed he was going to be executed for preaching the gospel, and despite the fact that all but one of the doctors who testified in the hearing believed he was seriously mentally ill, the lower courts greenlighted his execution anyway. The Supreme Court denied his last appeal of those decisions this past October, clearing the way for his December 3 execution.
The Supreme Court hasn't been especially sympathetic lately to arguments about mental illness and the death penalty. Last year, it refused to block the execution of another seriously mentally ill inmate in Florida, John Ferguson, who went to his death believing he was the prince of God. But Panetti's pro bono lawyers, Kathryn Kase and Greg Wiercioch, argue that public opinion on the issue is changing, and that the law needs to change with it. They cite a new poll showing that nearly 60 percent of Americans oppose executing someone with a serious mental illness. They also reference new research showing that juries and judges today are far less likely to choose death for a mentally ill defendant than they were 20 or 30 years ago. In 11 former and current death penalty states that allow for a "guilty but mentally ill" verdict, there hasn't been a death sentence imposed on a mentally ill person in at least 20 years.
The Supreme Court petitions also seem clearly targeted at Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was the swing vote in Panetti's favor in 2007, and who is somewhat fond of citing international law in his opinions. Panetti's lawyers emphasize that executing the mentally ill is considered a major human rights violation by most other civilized countries. We'll soon know whether these arguments are proving persuasive, as Texas is moving full steam ahead for Panetti's lethal injection. The high court will have to act quickly one way or another.
The following infographic was created by the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit group that seeks to fix the flaws in the death penalty process and ensure fair representation for capital defendants:
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Democracy Now! Daily Show
link to segment on Panetti: http://publish.dvlabs.com/democracynow/ipod/dn2014-1202.mp4
December 2, 2014
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Diverse coalition opposes execution of mentally ill convict in Texas
By Catherine Garcia, December 1, 2014
Death penalty opponents, conservative Republican judges, mental health organizations, and Ron Paul have all asked Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole to grant clemency for Scott Panetti, a mentally ill convict scheduled to die Wednesday.
Coalition notwithstanding, Panetti's fate now appears to rest in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole voted 7-0 against recommending clemency. Panetti was first diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978, and was convicted of capital murder after he shaved his head, put on fatigues, and shot his second wife's parents in 1992 while in a psychotic rage, Mother Jones reports. During his trial, Panetti represented himself, wearing a purple cowboy suit to court. He applied for subpoenas for JFK and Jesus Christ, and blamed the murders on his alter ego, Sergeant Iron Horse.
Even Panetti's ex-wife is asking that he not be put to death as he is "deeply sick." Panetti's lawyers have asked the high court to review his case to see if putting a mentally ill person to death violates the Eighth Amendment. They also say that Panetti — who is said to believe there is a listening device inside of his tooth — hasn't had a mental competency hearing in seven years. If he is put to death, Panetti will be the 11th inmate executed in Texas during 2014.
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Attorneys petition Supreme Court to stay mentally ill man's execution
Convicted murderer set to be given lethal injection on Wednesday despite not understanding why, lawyers say
by Ned Resnikoff, December 1, 2014
Lawyers for a death row inmate who believes his upcoming execution is part of a holy war between “demons” and “angels” have launched a last-ditch effort to save the condemned man’s life.
The State of Texas is due to execute 56-year-old Scott Panetti on Wednesday for murdering his mother-in-law and father-in-law.
But his defense attorneys argue that their client should not be executed at all, on the grounds that he is too mentally ill to understand the reason why he is being put to death. They claim that Panetti suffers from delusions, citing his apparent belief that his punishment is part of a religious fight pitting “the demons and the forces of the darkness” against “God and the angels and the forces of light.”
Those attorneys are now engaged in an eleventh-hour bid to save Panetti’s life. On Monday, lawyers with the Texas Defender Service petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution, arguing that their client is not mentally competent to be executed.
“There is no doubt that Mr. Panetti was a severely mentally [ill] person before, during, and after the crime for which he has been sentenced to death,” wrote the defendant’s counsel in their motion for a stay of execution. “And Mr. Panetti’s mental state has further deteriorated since his last evaluation in 2007.”
Panetti’s mental fitness to be executed has already been the subject of Supreme Court review in the 2007 case Panetti v. Quarterman. At the time, the court ruled that Panetti could be spared the death penalty if he was found to lack a “rational understanding” of the reasons for his execution. The case then got bounced back to the lower courts, where the state of Texas maintains that Panetti is sane enough to understand the nature of his punishment and why it is taking place. Prosecutors contend that he deliberately plays up his mental illness to suggest otherwise.
The Panetti v. Quarterman ruling expanded on the 1986 Ford v. Wainwright decision, in which justices found that death row inmates have the right to be psychologically evaluated before being put to death. In an opinion concurring with the majority ruling, Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote that it was unconstitutional to execute “those who are unaware of the punishment they are about to suffer and why they are to suffer it."
After the 2007 ruling, “awareness” of the punishment was no longer enough: Henceforth, states could only execute inmates who passed the “rational understanding” test.
Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the Supreme Court’s new standard requires a more thorough screening of psychological fitness.
“They said it’s not just a formulaic evaluation — you should look at his whole history to see if he does have a rational understanding of why he’s about to be executed,” said Dieter. Under the Ford v. Wainwright decision, “you just need to determine whether the defendant knows that he’s being executed and that the execution is a response to the crime he committed,” he said.
The exemption applies, said Dieter, because capital punishment for the obviously insane would not function effectively as retribution, or have any meaningful deterrent effect.
“There’s really no purpose in doing it to somebody who doesn’t know what’s happening to him,” he said. “You’re not deterring people like him, because they don’t understand.”
The still vaguely defined scope of the reasonable understanding standard is getting another test in Indiana, where a Superior County Court judge recently ruled that convicted murderer Michael Overstreet is not competent to be executed because he apparently doesn’t understand that the execution would result in his permanent death. A psychiatrist told the court that Overstreet believes himself to be comatose and remains convinced the “execution” would not actually kill him.
The Indiana Attorney General’s office said it was considering an appeal in a statement released shortly after the verdict. A spokesperson for the attorney general did not return a request for comment, and Overstreet’s attorney was unavailable for comment as of press time.
Meanwhile, a poll published last week by the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling found that 58 percent of respondents oppose the use of the death penalty for mentally ill prisoners, while 28 percent condone it and 14 percent are undecided. The latest polling shows slightly higher support for executing the mentally ill than a 2002 Gallup poll, which found 75 percent in opposition and 19 percent in favor.
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https://in.news.yahoo.com/us-lawyers-try-prevent-execution-schizophrenic-inmate-100228452.html
US lawyers try to prevent execution of schizophrenic inmate
December 1, 2014
Austin (Texas), Dec 2 (IANS/EFE) The lawyers for Scott Panetti, an inmate suffering from schizophrenia who is to be executed Wednesday, have asked the US Supreme Court to reconsider his case after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted against delaying the execution by lethal injection.
Panetti, who in 1992 killed his in-laws and kidnapped his wife and three-year-old daughter in Texas, seems to be running out of options to escape his date with the executioner.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously voted Monday against delaying Panetti's execution for 180 days and also denied a request by Texas Governor Rick Perry to commute the sentence to life in prison.
After the Texas parole board's rejection, Panetti's lawyers filed a reprieve letter with Governor Perry asking him to issue a 30-day suspension and also asked the US Supreme Court to stop his execution on the grounds that he was severely mentally ill.
Their third recourse was the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals with jurisdiction over Texas where the lawyers have filed an appeal for a suspension until Panetti was subjected to an examination.
During his 1995 trial, Panetti defended himself dressed as a cowboy and tried to call more than 200 witnesses including former President John F. Kennedy, Pope John Paul II and Jesus Christ.
Moreover, he pinned the crimes on his alter ego "Sarge".
Since then he has been hospitalised for psychosis and delusions on multiple occasions.
Several organisations, led by the American Psychiatric Association, as well as doctors, religious leaders and lawyers have requested clemency for the convict.
Even Panetti's ex-wife, Sonja Alvarado said in 1999 in a sworn statement that he "suffers from a mental illness and should not be executed".
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for Panetti, who will be executed Wednesday evening in the Huntsville Prison if none of the three options to defer his death is successful
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Texas Denies Stay of Execution for Mentally Ill Man; Lawyers Plead Supreme Court to Intervene
By Stoyan Zaimov, December 2, 2014
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously voted 7-0 on Monday afternoon to deny a stay of execution for Scott Panetti, a severely mentally ill man who is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday for the murder of his parents-in-law. Panetti's lawyers have urgently asked the Supreme Court to intervene and save his life.
"Mr. Panetti is a sick man who has suffered from schizophrenia, an incurable mental illness, for over 30 years, including prior to and during the crime, and during his trial at which he represented himself in a floridly psychotic state," Kathryn Kase, attorney for Scott Panetti and executive director of Texas Defender Service, wrote in a statement.
"Widespread and diverse voices agree that Mr. Panetti's execution would cross a moral line and serve no retributive or deterrent value, including national and Texas leaders in mental health, leading conservative, libertarian and evangelical Christian voices, former judges and prosecutors, legislators, governors and attorneys general and many more," she continued.
"Despite the board's short-sighted recommendation today, there is still time for Governor Rick Perry to issue a 30-day reprieve in order to evaluate Mr. Panetti's competency to be executed, which has not been assessed in over seven years."
Panetti was found guilty of murdering his parents-in-law in 1992. He had been hospitalized 12 times due to psychotic behavior before he committed the murders, and has shown that he believes he is in a spiritual battle with Satan. The 56-year-old man, who has attempted to subpoena the Pope, John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ while representing himself in trial, has also indicated that he believes he is being executed for preaching the Gospel.
A new poll released by Public Policy Polling meanwhile found that although most Americans remain split on the subject of the death penalty, most would reject executing mentally ill people. Fifty-eight percent of respondents to the poll opposed executions for the mentally ill, while only 28 percent supported it.
"Today's important polling is part of significant new research which clearly shows an emerging consensus against using capital punishment in cases where the defendant is mentally ill," said Robert Smith, an assistant professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"The poll joins other new data demonstrating that sentencing trends are down across the country for death-eligible defendants with severe mental illness. Combining this public polling, sentencing practices, and the recommendations of the mental health medical community, it's clear that a consensus is emerging against the execution of a person like Scott Panetti, who suffers from a debilitating illness which is similar to intellectual disability in that it lessens both his culpability and arguable social value of his execution."
The PPP poll of 943 registered voters was conducted on November 24-25, and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1.
Panetti's lawyers cited the poll in their plea for a stay of execution to the Supreme Court, noting that the Eighth Amendment protects people from cruel and unusual punishment and prohibits states from executing people with severe mental illness.
A group of over 50 Evangelical leaders have also opposed Panetti's execution, stating that it would cross a moral line for the nation.
"As Christians, we are called to protect the most vulnerable, and we count Mr. Panetti — a man who has suffered from severe mental illness for over 30 years — to be among them. If ever there was a clear case of an individual suffering from mental illness, this is it," the Christian leaders wrote to Perry earlier in November.
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http://www.texastribune.org/2014/12/01/Paroles-Board-Denies-Panetti-Execution-Halt/
Panetti Fate in Hands of Perry, Appeals Courts
by Terri Langford Dec. 1, 2014
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday declined to recommend a reprieve for convicted killer Scott Panetti, leaving it up to Gov. Rick Perry to decide if he will delay Wednesday's scheduled execution of the schizophrenic death row inmate.
The panel voted 7-0 against granting Panetti a 180-day reprieve, or recommending that Perry commute the 56-year-old's death sentence to life, board spokesman Raymond Estrada said.
The board's recommendation now goes to Perry, who can accept it or issue a 30-day reprieve on his own authority. Panetti is scheduled for execution in Huntsville on Wednesday at 6 p.m.
Panetti, a Wisconsin native who represented himself at trial and dressed up in a cowboy suit in court, was convicted for the 1992 shooting deaths of his in-laws, Joe Gaitan Alvarado, Jr. and Amanda Carrion Alvarado of Kerr County. At the time of the murders, Panetti had been long diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and collected federal disability checks because he could not work.
Panetti's lawyers, armed with signatures and letters from religious leaders, prominent lawyers, former Gov. Mark White and former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, sought a reprieve from the panel, saying that Panetti's mental condition has deteriorated in prison and that he is too mentally ill to be legally executed.
Panetti was first diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978, the year after he served just 10 months in the U.S. Navy before receiving an honorable discharge.
"The circumstances of this case present a situation where execution does not serve the State of Texas. Respectfully I request that you grant clemency in this case,” wrote Paul.
Following the board's decision, Panetti's defense team quickly sent Perry a letter asking for a 30-day delay so that their client could be adequately assessed for competency.
Panetti's defense team has three routes to try to halt the execution.
In addition to seeking a reprieve from Perry, lawyers Kathryn Kase and Gregory Wiercioch have asked the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to order that the execution be stopped until their client is given a competency exam. Panetti's mental competence has not been assessed in nearly seven years.
And on Monday, they asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider Panetti's case. The high court has previously ruled that mentally ill inmates cannot be put to death if they do not understand why they are being executed.
"All courts so far have adjudged Mr. Panetti competent, while noting Mr. Panetti's severe mental illness," the lawyers wrote. "It is indisputable, however, that Mr. Panetti's severe illness impacted both how the jurors evaluated the evidence against Mr. Panetti's ability to be an advocate for himself."
In one of Panetti's previous appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mentally ill inmates can be executed as long as they understand what is about to happen and why. Panetti's mental state has not been evaluated since 2007, his attorneys wrote, so there's no way to know if he meets that test.
Kase pointed out on Monday that legally, she and her co-counsel could not appeal based on the competency issue until an execution for Panetti was set. She and Wiercioch were not notified by the court that set Panetti's date in mid-October, as is custom, but from a published report about the case on Oct. 30. They immediately began appealing on the competency issue.
Kase said her client told her during a recent interview that he believes he's being executed because he's preaching the gospel on death row and to keep him from exposing corruption in the prison system.
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Schizophrenic killer who addressed jury as 'Sgt. Ironhorse’ set to die
By Michelle Casady, December 1, 2014
In the days after Scott Louis Panetti shot his in-laws to death, splattering his estranged wife and 3-year-old daughter with their blood, his neighbors didn’t seem surprised that authorities said he was responsible.
“The guy was very unstable,” one neighbor told the Express-News 22 years ago, recalling an instance in 1989 in which Panetti came to his house wearing camouflage paint on his face and claiming the president had recruited him for the invasion of Panama.
Others in the neighborhood described him as an intense “Rambo-type character” prone to abrupt mood swings and a person who “everyone knew . . . was dangerous.”
Panetti, now 56, was diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1978 and was hospitalized for psychosis and delusions 14 times before the 1992 double slayings of Jose Alvarado, 55, and Amanda Alvarado, 56, in their Fredericksburg home. His execution, scheduled to take place Wednesday, has attracted international attention over whether he is sane enough to understand why he is being put to death.
Opponents of his execution include former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, Democratic former Gov. Mark White, the American Bar Association, which represents nearly 400,000 members, dozens of evangelical leaders, the European Union and more than 90,000 people who have signed a Change.org petition.
Panetti was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1995, after a trial in which he was allowed to represent himself and occasionally spoke in the third-person as an alter-ego named Sgt. Ranahan Ironhorse. He also claimed to be controlled by three other personalities named Texas Will, Montana Will and Chaplain.
Panetti attempted to subpoena Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy and the pope during the trial. He wore a purple handkerchief around his neck, pants tucked into his boots, a cowboy hat and suspenders — resembling John Wayne in the movie “Stagecoach.”
During rambling closing arguments for the punishment phase of a trial, he recited a poem.
“The Texas Department of Public Safety tamed the Iron Horse,” he said. “I think they went beyond taming, and I think they broke him.”
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Hill Country Killer Faces Execution Despite Mental Illness Claims
December 2, 2014
Several prominent conservatives, including American Values President Gary Bauer and ConservativeHQ President Richard Vigurie, are among those writing to Gov. Rick Perry urging him to grand clemency to Hill Country killer Scott Panetti, who is set to be executed tomorrow night for the murder of his in-laws in Fredericksburg back in 1992, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
"It is clear that Panetti has been suffering mental illness since long before he committed the offense that landed him on death row," write the two dozen conservatives, many of whom are strong supporters of Capital Punishment. "As conservatives, we feel that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used agaisnt a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought, and it is immoral for the government to take this man's life."
The conservatives say the sentence should be changed to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Defense Attorney Kathryn Kase says Panetti, 52, was diagnosed as schizophrenic at Brooke Army Medical Center back in 1978.
"Schizophrenia is an incurable mental illness," Kase said. "Nobody gets schizophrenia and then is able to say, I'm cured, I'm well."
Panetti was diagnosed 14 years before he kicked down the door of his in-laws home and killed both of them with blasts from a double barreled shotgun. He then took his estranged wife and their child hostage, telling police it was his alter ego named 'Sarge' who did it.
At his trial in 1994, Panetti dressed in a clownish 'Tom Mix' style cowboy outfit, and, representing himself, called the Pope, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ as character witnesses.
Kase says it defeats the purpose of capital punishment as a penalty if the person being executed does not understand why the execution is taking place.
"He has this overriding belief, which is not at all rational, but it is his belief, that the prison system wants to kill him to stop him from preaching the gospel on Death Row."
Prosecutor say Panetti is faking it, and say while he may have mental illness, he is certainly able to distinguish right from wrong. Several appellate courts and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals have rejected his request for a stay of execution. The matter is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.
"It would cross a moral line," Kase said. "There is no question that he has schizophrenia, he is severely mentally ill, and he has been since 1978.
The Supreme Court in 2002 declared the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment bars executing persons with severe mental illness.
The justices now have to decide if Panetti fits into that category.
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Texas to execute Scott Panetti Wednesday despite mental illness
Court-appointed stand-by attorney talks about trial
By Paul Venema, December 1, 2014
KERRVILLE, Texas - In 1992, Scott Panetti shot and killed his mother and father-in-law. He was then convicted of capital murder in Kerrville and sentenced to death in 1995.
Prior to his trial, Panetti asked for and was granted permission to act as his own attorney.
Scott Monroe, who is now the Kerr County District Attorney for the 198th District, was appointed as Panetti’s stand-by counsel.
“I think that most people would start off by saying that guy’s got to be crazy to do that, and in this case there was a lot of truth to that,” Monroe said Monday.
He said that the evidence supported that.
“Scott (Panetti) had a documented history of mental illness,” Monroe said. “There was never any doubt ever that Scott (Panetti) was mentally ill.”
That is where the controversy surrounding Panetti’s execution is centered.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed an appeal based on Panetti’s mental condition last week. But death penalty opponents insist his mental condition should prevent his execution.
Panetti's attorneys requested his execution date postponed so that he can undergo further psychological testing to determine if he's competent to be put to death.
They believe his case raises questions about the legality of executing the mentally ill — an issue the U.S. Supreme Court has previously considered.
Panetti is scheduled to be executed in Huntsville on Wednesday.
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Cuccinelli, Earley ask Texas to spare life of mentally ill killer
By Frank Green, December 1, 2014
Two former Virginia attorneys general are among a dozen conservatives who have signed a letter asking Texas Gov. Rick Perry to spare the life of a mentally ill man set to be executed Wednesday.
According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Scott Panetti, 56, was sentenced to death for the 1992 slayings of his in-laws in their Fredericksburg, Texas, home, later telling police his alter ego, “Sarge,” was responsible.
Panetti’s lawyers have filed a petition with Perry and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, both of which must agree to a commutation, unlike in Virginia where only the governor need act.
“The case of Scott Louis Panetti is a judicial disaster that has attracted national and international outrage — and for good reason. Evidence of his incompetency runs like a fissure through every proceeding in his case from arraignment to execution,” Panetti’s lawyers wrote.
Though Panetti’s lawyers describe Panetti as “floridly psychotic,” a judge permitted him to represent himself at his trial. Lawyers for Texas oppose commutation of the sentence.
The American Psychiatric Association, Mental Health America, former judges and prosecutors, evangelical leaders and the American Bar Association are among those asking Perry to commute the sentence, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
On Monday, more than a dozen conservative leaders, including former Virginia Attorneys General Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Earley, both Republicans like Perry, joined in the effort to spare Panetti’s life, according to the website ConservativeHQ.com.
Reached by telephone Monday, Cuccinelli said, “This just strikes me as a rather ripe case for commutation of a sentence based on a defendant’s mental illness and mental capacity.”
“He was demonstrably mentally ill long before the crime occurred,” he said. “That’s a person that I would hope most Americans don’t think should be put to death. But whether most Americans do or not, I signed the letter because I don’t.”
Cuccinelli said he does not intend to minimize the crimes.
“You have people who were killed,” he said. “It’s one of the hardest things governors have to face in states with the death penalty.”
Panetti’s lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to halt his lethal injection and determine whether mentally ill people should be exempt from the death penalty because it is unconstitutionally cruel punishment, The Associated Press reported.
Panetti is one of a dozen people with execution dates set in Texas, which has executed more than 500 since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume in 1976, the highest total in the country. Virginia has conducted 110 executions during the same period.
fgreen@timesdispatch
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Conservatives to Perry: Commute sentence of mentally ill death row inmate
By David McCabe, December 1, 2014
A group of conservatives said on Monday that Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) should stop the execution of a man whose lawyers say he is severely mentally ill, as long the state’s parole board recommends it.
“Rather than serving as a measured response to murder, the execution of [Scott] Panetti would only serve to undermine the public’s faith in a fair and moral justice system,” they said in a letter to the governor, which was signed by 20 conservative writers and leaders.
“As conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought. It would be immoral for the government to take this man’s life,” they said.
Panetti was sentenced to death for murdering his in-laws — in front of his wife and daughter — in 1992.
His advocates say he has suffered from schizophrenia since before the crime was committed. They asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend that Perry commute Panetti’s sentence to life in prison. They have also asked the Supreme Court to stay his execution on Eighth Amendment grounds.
Prior to the crime, Panetti buried his furniture in his backyard because he believed that would stop the Devil from interfering in his life. He later subpoenaed Jesus while representing himself in his capital murder trial.
Prosecutors have said in the past that they believe Panetti’s claims of mental illness to be a ruse.
The letter is signed by several prominent conservatives, including former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), currently the president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, and writer Charles Murray.
The controversy over Panetti’s execution comes at a time when conservatives are rethinking “tough on crime” rhetoric.
Increasingly, Republicans have joined Democrats in calling for a reduction in the number of people incarcerated in federal prison. Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) has partnered with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on a prison reform package that would help divert low-risk offenders to other programs.
Others have called for more wide-ranging reforms. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has said that federal mandatory minimum sentences, which have helped contribute to the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, must be revised. He has also said that voting rights should be restored to offenders convicted of nonviolent felonies.
Texas has been hailed as a model for the nation for reducing its prison population.
The national trend in favor of criminal justice reform has not always included the death penalty. Despite a growing shortage of the drugs used for lethal injection, states have continued to execute prisoners.
There have been 33 executions so far in 2014. The number of executions nationally has fallen since it peaked in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
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http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/67972
Update: Conservative Leaders Ask Gov. Perry to Spare Life of Severely Mentally Ill Man
By Christian Newswire Richard Viguerie, Bob Sturm December 1, 2014
MANASSAS, Va.,—UPDATE: Conservative leader Gary Bauer of American Values was added to the list. A link to the full text of the letter to Gov. Perry was also added.
Over a dozen national leaders of the conservative movement have jointly signed a letter asking Governor Rick Perry to commute the death sentence of Scott Panetti to a life sentence if the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommends it.
In their letter to Governor Perry the conservative leaders wrote, “Mr. Panetti is one of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners on death row in the United States. Rather than serving as a measured response to murder, the execution of Mr. Panetti would only serve to undermine the public’s faith in a fair and moral justice system.”
The conservatives, who include two former state attorneys general, wrote, “It is clear that [Panetti] has been suffering from severe mental illness since long before he committed the offense that landed him on death row. . . . As conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought. It would be immoral for the government to take this man’s life. Should the Board [of Pardons and Paroles] recommend it, we respectfully urge you to reduce Mr. Panetti’s death sentence to life in prison.”
Conservative leaders signing the letter include:
Brent Bozell, President, For America
Ken Cuccinelli, President, Senate Conservatives Fund
Dave Keene, Opinion Editor, The Washington Times
Pat Nolan, Director Center for Criminal Justice Reform, the American Conservative Union Foundation
Richard Viguerie, Chairman, ConservativeHQ.com
Ron Robinson, President, Young America’s Foundation
Jim Miller, Budget Director for President Ronald Reagan
Craig Shirley, Reagan Biographer
C. Preston Noell, III, President, Tradition, Family, Property, Inc.
Rebecca Hagelin, Columnist, The Washington Times
Floyd Brown, President, Western Center for Journalism
Charles Murray, WH Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Patrick A. Trueman, Attorney At Law
Mark L. Earley, Sr., Former Attorney General of Virginia and
Former President and CEO of Prison Fellowship USA
Morton Blackwell, Chairman, The Weyrich Lunch
James L. Martin, Chairman, 60 Plus Association
Tricia Erickson, President, Angel Pictures and Publicity
Maggie Gallagher, Author
Diana L. Banister, President, Shirley & Banister Public Affairs
Mark Fitzgibbons, President of Corporate Affairs, American Target Advertising
Gary L. Bauer, President, American Values
The full text of the letter to Governor Rick Perry can be found here.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2856470/Supreme-Court-asked-halt-Texas-execution.html
Left-wing activists, conservatives and Christian leaders in bid to save life of 'delusional' Texas death row inmate ahead of Wednesday execution
Scott Panetti's execution is scheduled for December 3, but his defense team seeks to delay it
Panetti, 56, was sentenced to death by lethal injection for killing his mother- and father-in-law in 1992
His lawyers say he is too severely mentally ill to be put to death
Supreme Court allows capital punishment for mentally ill prisoners as long as the inmate understands why he's being executed
Panetti was his own attorney in capital murder trial, wore cowboy getup to court and tried to subpoena Jesus and JFK
By ASSOCIATED PRESS and SNEJANA FARBEROV FOR MAILONLINE
December 2, 2014
An unlikely alliance of left-leaning human rights activists, right-wing conservatives and church leaders has been forged to try and save the life of a mentally ill convicted killer slated for execution this week.
Attorneys representing Scott Panetti asked the US Supreme Court Monday to halt his lethal injection scheduled for Wednesday saying he is too delusional for execution.
Panetti, 56, is set to be put to death for the 1992 shooting deaths of his estranged wife's parents at their home in Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country.
There was 'no doubt' Panetti was severely mentally ill 'before, during and after the crime for which he has been sentenced to death,' attorneys Gregory Wiercioch and Kathryn Kase told the justices.
'And Mr. Panetti's mental state has further deteriorated since his last evaluation in 2007.'
The long list of those who are opposed to Mr Panetti's execution includes more than 50 Evangelical Christian leaders, seven Methodist bishops, 10 Texas state lawmakers and former libertarian presidential candidate and Republican Congressman Ron Paul, reported The Independent.
Last month, Paul wrote a letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry asking him to grant Panetti clemency.
Perry's gubernatorial predecessor Mark White, a Democrat, has gone on record calling Panetti's capital murder trial a 'sham.'
Nearly 100,000 people from all walks of life have signed an online petition on Change.org asking to spare Panetti's life.
Even his ex-wife, Sonja, whose parents the inmate shot dead in front of her in 1992, has declared that she believes he is too mentally ill to be put to death.
Scott Panetti's case has something for everyone: libertarians oppose the death penalty because they do not trust the government; fiscal conservatives believe that executing an inmate costs more than imprisoning him for life, and religious conservatives reject capital punishment as a pro-life matter.
Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood abortion clinic staffer-turned anti-abortion activist, wrote in a recent Dallas Morning News op-ed that opposing Panetti's execution is consistent with the key principles of the pro-life movement.
'A fundamental tenet of the pro-life ethic is that all life has value and we are called to protect it, especially in its most vulnerable forms. A culture of life recognizes the value of those who are vulnerable and prioritizes safeguarding them,' she wrote.
Panetti, a Hayward, Wisconsin, native, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978 and had been hospitalized more than a dozen times for treatment in the decade before killing Joe and Amanda Alvarado.
Attorneys said the double homicide was the result of a 'psychotic break' Panetti had suffered.
His wife was living with her parents and a week earlier had obtained a court order to keep Panetti away.
His wife and 3-year-old daughter, were sprayed with blood when Panetti shot his in-laws.
They were held hostage until he surrendered after a lengthy standoff with police. He blamed it all on 'Sarge,' one of his multiple personalities.
Justices in 2002 prohibited the execution of people who are mentally impaired, deciding it violated the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
But they have allowed capital punishment for mentally ill prisoners as long as the inmate has a factual and rational understanding of why he's being put to death.
The 'rational understanding' provision was added by the Supreme Court in a 2007 ruling on an appeal from Panetti.
Records indicate his case has gone to the Supreme Court at least five times since his 1995 conviction and sentence.
'Imposition of the death penalty on people with severe mental illness, as with people with intellectual disability, does not serve the two goals of deterrence and retribution because of their reduced moral culpability,' Panetti's lawyers argued to the high court Monday.
Another appeal for Panetti pending before a federal appeals court seeks an execution delay for additional competency evaluations.
While his medical records contain indications of mental illness, they 'strongly indicate rational awareness of his impending execution and the reason for it,' Ellen Stewart-Klein, an assistant Texas attorney general, told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
'Panetti's mental status has at best been severely exaggerated by his counsel,' she said.
Also Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles refused a petition from Panetti's lawyers to delay his execution for 180 days or recommend to Republican Governor Rick Perry that Panetti's death sentence be commuted to life, board spokesman Raymond Estrada said.
At his trial, Panetti 'wore the garish costume of a dime-store cowboy as he represented himself' and 'engaged in bizarre, incoherent and frightening behavior,' his attorneys said.
His trial judge ruled he could be his own lawyer and appointed a standby attorney whom Panetti never consulted except to call as a witness during the trial's punishment phase.
At one point, the defendant even tried to subpoena Jesus Christ and assassinated President John F. Kennedy as witnesses. He insisted only an insane person could prove insanity.
I just wanted to see my wife,' Panetti, in a taped statement played at his capital murder trial, explained why he went to the home armed with a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun and three knives and dressed in camouflage clothing
'I put on my combat stuff so if I was cornered, I wanted to have my equipment. It was like I wasn't even in control, like someone else was pushing me.'
No court has ruled Panetti was or is incompetent or insane. He has told lawyers his scheduled punishment was part of a satanic conspiracy to prevent him from preaching the gospel.
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Scott Panetti execution: Activists in last-ditch bid to halt death of mentally ill killer in Texas
By Tim Walker, December 1, 2014
This week, the state of Texas intends to execute Scott Panetti, who in 1992 shot dead his mother-in-law and father-in-law in front of his estranged wife and their three-year-old daughter. That Mr Panetti, now 56, committed the murders has never been in doubt; he admitted as much at his trial in 1995, when he defended himself while dressed in a purple cowboy outfit and attempted to call more than 200 witnesses, including John F Kennedy and Jesus Christ.
Long before it became clear from his courtroom antics, Mr Panetti had been diagnosed as severely mentally ill, which is why his impending lethal injection – due to be carried out tomorrow – is opposed by not only his lawyers and a familiar collection of human rights groups, but also by an alliance of conservatives.
Among those protesting against Mr Panetti’s death sentence are more than 50 leading evangelical Christians, seven Methodist bishops, 10 Texas state politicians and the libertarian former presidential candidate Ron Paul. Mr Paul, a former Republican congressman who once backed the death penalty, wrote last month to Rick Perry, the Texas Governor, to appeal for clemency in the Panetti case. It is thought to be the first time he has publicly opposed an execution.
The state’s former Democrat Governor, Mark White, said: “I know very well that in so many instances, there are incredibly close and difficult calls that have to be made to either allow or prohibit the death penalty from being carried out. But Scott Panetti’s plea for clemency is no such case. He is a severely mentally ill man. His trial was a sham. And executing Panetti would say far more about us than it would about the man we are attempting to kill.”
Mr Panetti was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic by army doctors in 1978. Several years later, he buried all of the furniture in his home, believing the Devil was hiding in it. He was hospitalised more than a dozen times between his first diagnosis and 1992, when his wife, Sonja, obtained a restraining order and took their daughter to live with her parents, Joe and Amanda Alvarado, in the Texas Hill Country town of Fredericksburg. She reportedly tried to have her husband committed, and even took his guns to the police, but they refused to confiscate the weapons and instead returned them to their owner.
Days later, Mr Panetti donned a camouflage uniform, shaved his head and went to his in-laws’ home, where he shot the couple dead, showering his wife and child in their blood. Later that afternoon, after washing and changing into a suit, he gave himself up.
At trial, Mr Panetti claimed he was ordered to carry out the killings by Sergeant Ranahan Iron Horse, an auditory hallucination whom he called “Sarge”. The court, which could have stepped in and compelled him to hire a lawyer, instead allowed Mr Panetti to continue defending himself. On death row, he reportedly suffers from the delusion that Satan planned his execution to prevent him preaching Christianity to other inmates. He also claims the prison dentist implanted a listening device in his tooth, and that pop star Selena Gomez is his daughter.
It is seven years since Mr Panetti’s mental competence was last evaluated. In 2007, the US Supreme Court considered his case, and in its decision said a prisoner who lacked “rational understanding” of why they were being executed should not be put to death. Yet the case was sent back to a lower federal court, which last year concluded that Mr Panetti was competent and that his lethal injection could proceed.
The state of Texas argues that Mr Panetti has exaggerated his condition, but Kathryn Kase, one of his lawyers, told the Associated Press news agency: “He cannot appreciate why Texas seeks to execute him. You have to have a rational as well as factual understanding of why you are being executed. In Mr Panetti’s case, his understanding is the state wants to prevent him from preaching the Gospel on death row and saving their souls. And clearly that’s not factual or rational.”
Texas is responsible for almost 40 per cent of executions carried out in the US since 1977, and Mr Perry has overseen more executions that any other US governor in history. Although he cannot commute Mr Panetti’s sentence without the recommendation of a state pardons board, he can grant a 30-day stay of execution – time for Mr Panetti’s lawyers to organise a new mental evaluation.
The unlikely coalition of conservatives against the death penalty has found in Mr Panetti’s case a cause célèbre. Last year, Mr Paul publicly endorsed the campaign group Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, saying he believed capital punishment was “inconsistent with libertarianism and traditional conservatism”.
Some libertarians, including Mr Paul, oppose the death penalty because they distrust government’s ability to apply it fairly and effectively. Fiscal conservatives are swayed by the argument that the legal costs of executions far outweigh those of life imprisonment. Many religious conservatives have turned against capital punishment in the context of their existing opposition to abortion.
Abby Johnson, who once ran a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, but now leads an anti-abortion ministry, wrote in the Dallas Morning News last month that she had dedicated herself to “promoting a culture of life”. She added: “A fundamental tenet of the pro-life ethic is that all life has value and we are called to protect it... By setting an execution date for Panetti, Texas is going entirely contrary to what we expect in a society that truly values life.”
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http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/scott-panetti-execution-protesters-make-4730692
Scott Panetti execution: Protesters make desperate bid to stop paranoid schizophrenic killer getting lethal injection
By Sam Adams, Dec 02, 2014 10:18
Panetti was condemned to death for the murder of his mother-in law and father-in-law. He defended himself in court dressed in a purple cowboy suit
Protesters are making a desperate last ditch bid to prevent a paranoid schizophrenic murderer being executed.
Scott Panetti is due to be killed by lethal injection tomorrow.
He was condemned to death for the murder of his mother-in law and father-in-law in 1992. He killed them in front of his estranged wife and their three-year-old daughter.
The 56-year-old admitted to the killings during his trial in 1995.
He famously defended himself in court while dressed in a purple cowboy outfit.
Among the 200 witnesses he wanted to call were John F Kennedy and Jesus Christ, the Independent reports.
Mr Panetti has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which is why his lethal injection is widely opposed by conservatives, as well as human rights groups.
These reportedly include evangelical Christians, Methodist bishops, 10 Texas state politicians and the former presidential candidate Ron Paul.
Panetti's case has even led a former Republican congressman who once backed the death penalty to write to the Texas governor Rick Perry to appeal for clemency.
Former Texas governor Mark White, said: “I know very well that in so many instances, there are incredibly close and difficult calls that have to be made to either allow or prohibit the death penalty from being carried out. But Scott Panetti’s plea for clemency is no such case.
He is a severely mentally ill man. His trial was a sham. And executing Panetti would say far more about us than it would about the man we are attempting to kill.”
Since being diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic in 1978, Panetti was repeatedly hospitalised before he committed the killings.
Panetti was dressed in camouflage when he shot dead his in-laws. He gave himself up later that day.
During his murder trial, Panetti said he was told to carry out the killings by 'Sergeant Ranahan Iron Horse,' and auditory hallucination, the Independent reports.
His execution is due to happen tomorrow at the Huntsville facility in Texas.
Last year a federal court concluded that Mr Panetti was competent and that his execution should proceed, while the state of Texas says he has exaggerated his mental illness.
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Conservative Leaders Petition Texas Governor Against Execution of Severely Mentally Ill Death Row Inmate
By Bary Alyssa Johnson, December 1, 2014
Over a dozen national leaders of the conservative movement have come together to script and sign a letter to Tex. Governor Rick Perry, asking him to commute the upcoming death sentence of a severely mentally ill inmate to a life sentence, if agreed upon by the State Board of Pardons and Paroles.
The inmate, Scott Panetti, is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday Dec. 3. Having reportedly suffered from schizophrenia and other mental illnesses for more than three decades, Panetti's lawyers maintain that executing the man would violate certain constitutional protections.
It's not only Panetti's legal counsel that argue his execution would be a legal travesty. The aforementioned conservative leaders have voiced their formal protest over the matter.
"Mr. Panetti is one of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners on Death Row in the United States," the coalition of conservatives wrote in their letter to Perry. "Rather than serving as a measured response to murder, the execution of Mr. Panetti would only serve to undermine the public's faith in a fair and moral justice system."
A report from The Atlantic supports the previous mention of unconstitutionality. The report offers support for constitutional protections by citing a 1986 Supreme Court case, Ford v. Wainwright, that prohibited the execution of people "who are so out of touch with reality" that they can't figure right from wrong and can't understand their punishment or the purpose of it.
Due in part to both his lifelong mental health history as well as the conduct Panetti displayed during his murder trial, the inmate should be protected by the outcome of the Ford v. Wainwright case. The following are some of the many examples of evidence that should demonstrate Panetti's tenuous grip on his own sanity and, as such, his need for constitutional protections:
It's been reported that Panetti initially exhibited signs of a psychotic disorder as a teenager. He was first hospitalized for mental illness in 1978 and went on to be re-hospitalized a total of 15 times. One involuntary commitment occurred after he brandished a sword and swung it at his wife and daughter, threatening to kill them.
Panetti ended up on Death Row after going off his medications in 1992. On the day of the murder that he is to be executed for he reportedly shaved his head, dressed up in combat fatigues and went over to his in-laws house. There he murdered his mother and father-in-law in front of his wife and daughter.
The antics that occured during Panetti's subsequent murder trial were something one might expect to see on television or in the movies, but certainly not in real life.
Throughout all phases of the trial, Panetti represented himself and his courtroom wardrobe reportedly consisted of a cowboy costume and purple bandana that he donned day in and day out. Among the 200 people that Panetti subpoenaed as witnesses were Jesus Christ, the Pope and John F. Kennedy. His statements during the trial have been described as rambling and incoherent and he was often seen sleeping during the proceedings.
When put on the stand to describe the murders, Panetti allegedly took on a different personality - a man by the name of "Sarge." He narrated the events in the third person and at one point aimed an imaginary rifle at the jurors and pretended to shoot them.
The jury ended up convicting Panetti of murder and at the penalty phase of the trial they deliberated for just one day before bestowing the death sentence upon him.
Even through all of this evidence of a man in the severe throes of mental illness before, during and ever since his trial, Texas courts still plan to condemn him on Wednesday.
The conservatives who are bringing the fight for clemency in this most unusual case to the front door of the Texas Governor's office are a varied bunch. They include, among others, two former state attorney generals.
In their letter to Perry they maintain that "it is clear that [Panetti] has been suffering from severe mental illness since long before he committed the offense that landed him on Death Row."
"...As conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought," the letter reads. "It would be immoral for the government to take this man's life...we respectfully urge you to reduce Mr. Panetti's death sentence to life in prison."
In addition to the two former state attorney generals who have signed this letter are several attorneys, the President of the Senate Conservatives Fund, the President of the Western Center of Journalism, the Budget Director for President Ronald Reagan, an editor at The Washington Times, a columnist at The Washington Times and more. For a full list of the conservative group, click here.
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Scott Panetti Execution: Conservatives Urge Texas Gov. Perry to Reconsider Death Sentence of Mentally Ill Man
By Leah Marieann Klett, December 1, 2014
Over a dozen Conservative leaders are asking Texas Governor Rick Perry to commute the death sentence of Scott Panetti, a mentally challenged man who is set to receive a lethal injection on Wednesday, to life in prison without parole.
"Mr. Panetti is one of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners on death row in the United States. Rather than serving as a measured response to murder, the execution of Mr. Panetti would only serve to undermine the public's faith in a fair and moral justice system," wrote the conservatives, which includes former presidential candidate Ron Paul and 50 leading evangelical Christians, seven Methodist bishops, 10 Texas state politicians.
In 1992, Panetti turned himself into police after shooting and killing his in-laws at their Texas Hill Country home in front of his estranged wife and 3-year-old daughter. At the time of his trial, he had already been hospitalized more than a dozen times for psychosis related to his schizophrenia and had suffered delusions throughout his life.
The 56 year old former U.S. Navy veteran argued his case to the courts in dressed in a purple cowboy costume and a 10-gallon hat, and attempted to call famous witnesses to the stand such as President Kennedy, Pope John Paul II and Jesus Christ.
Panetti also reportedly spoke to himself in different voices and assumed the persona of "Sarge," the alter ego he believed was responsible for killing his in-laws.
The Huffington Post reports that a 2007 Supreme Court review of Panetti's case tweaked the criteria for executing those with severe mental disorders by requiring inmates to not only know that they are being punished, but to also have a "rational understanding" of their punishment.
However, the case was sent back to the lower courts, and Panetti was examined by psychiatrists in 2008 and the court again found him to be competent enough to execute.
Kathryn Kase, one of Panetti's lawyers, told CBS News that he has shown increasingly delusional behavior since his sentencing, and believes his punishment is "part of a satanic conspiracy to prevent him from preaching the Gospel."
"He cannot appreciate why Texas seeks to execute him," Kase said. "You have to have a rational as well as factual understanding of why you're being executed.
"In Mr. Panetti's case, his understanding is the state wants to prevent him from preaching the Gospel on death row and saving their souls. And clearly that's not factual or rational."
Panetti's attorneys and conservative groups are hoping to convince the Texas judicial system to reconsider the sentence, or perhaps get his execution date postponed so that he can undergo further psychological testing to determine if he's competent to be put to death.
"It is clear that [Panetti] has been suffering from severe mental illness since long before he committed the offense that landed him on death row," the letter to Gov. Perry continues.
"As conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought. It would be immoral for the government to take this man's life. Should the Board [of Pardons and Paroles] recommend it, we respectfully urge you to reduce Mr. Panetti's death sentence to life in prison."
Ron Honberg, national director for policy and legal affairs at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, writes that while there is "no question" that Panetti must be incarcerated, an execution would be "immoral and serve no purpose, either in retribution or to prevent similar crimes."
"Either the courts must step in to stay this travesty or Texas Gov. Rick Perry must commute Panetti's sentence to life," said Honberg.
"Otherwise, the state will kill an individual who is so ill and delusional that he cannot begin to comprehend his fate."
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http://wtaq.com/news/articles/2014/dec/01/wisconsin-man-faces-death-penalty-in-texas/
Wisconsin man faces death penalty in Texas
December 1, 2014
UNDATED (WSAU-Wheeler News) Hayward native Scott Panetti is scheduled to be put to death at six p-m Wednesday in Texas, where he was convicted of killing his ex-wife's parents in 1992. Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals voted 5-to-4 to deny a final state appeal in the case. It remains before the federal courts, after the U-S Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Panetti was not examined adequately to determine if he was suitable for execution due to mental illnesses first diagnosed in the mid-1970's.
Panetti, who's now 56, was a day away from execution in 2004 when a federal judge agreed to consider whether the death penalty would violate his right against cruel-and-unusual punishment. The state has long argued that Panetti is sane enough to understand why he's being put to death. Panetti was found guilty of killing Joe and Amanda Alvarado at their home in Fredericksburg Texas.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says 75,000 people have signed petitions asking Texas Governor Rick Perry to commute the sentence, and send Panetti to prison for life without parole. Former presidential candidate Ron Paul is among the signers. Panetti was an all-star football player at Poynette High School, and was hospitalized 15 times for schizo-phrenia before the killings. The case has bounced back and forth between the U-S Supreme Court and lower courts.
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http://www.conservativehq.com/node/19048
Conservative Leaders Ask Gov. Perry to Spare Life of Severely Mentally Ill Man
By CHQ Staff | 12/1/2014
Over a dozen national leaders of the conservative movement have jointly signed a letter asking Governor Rick Perry to commute the death sentence of Scott Panetti to a life sentence if the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommends it.
In their letter to Governor Perry the conservative leaders wrote, “Mr. Panetti is one of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners on death row in the United States. Rather than serving as a measured response to murder, the execution of Mr. Panetti would only serve to undermine the public’s faith in a fair and moral justice system.”
The conservatives, who include two former state attorneys general, wrote, “It is clear that [Panetti] has been suffering from severe mental illness since long before he committed the offense that landed him on death row. . . . As conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who is mentally incapable of rational thought. It would be immoral for the government to take this man’s life. Should the Board [of Pardons and Paroles] recommend it, we respectfully urge you to reduce Mr. Panetti’s death sentence to life in prison.”
Conservative leaders signing the letter include: Brent Bozell, President, ForAmerica; Ken Cuccinelli, President, Senate Conservatives Fund; Dave Keene, Opinion Editor, The Washington Times; Pat Nolan, Director Center for Criminal Justice Reform, the American Conservative Union Foundation; Richard Viguerie, Chairman, ConservativeHQ.com; Ron Robinson, President, Young America’s Foundation; Jim Miller, Husch Blackwell, LLP; Craig Shirley, Reagan Biographer; C. Preston Noell, III, President, Tradition, Family, Property, Inc.; Rebecca Hagelin, Columnist, The Washington Times; Floyd Brown, President, Western Center for Journalism; Charles Murray, WH Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; Patrick A. Trueman, Attorney at Law; Mark L. Earley, Sr., Former Attorney General of Virginia and Former President and CEO of Prison Fellowship USA; Morton Blackwell, Chairman, The Weyrich Lunch; James L. Martin, Chairman, 60 Plus Association; Tricia Erickson, President, Angel Pictures and Publicity, President, Crisis Management, Inc.; Maggie Gallagher, Author; Diana L. Banister, President, Shirley & Banister Public Affairs; Mark Fitzgibbons, President of Corporate Affairs, American Target Advertising, Inc.
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TEXAS SET TO EXECUTE MAN LAWYERS ARGUE IS MENTALLY ILL
by SARAH RUMPF, Dec 1, 2014
AUSTIN, Texas -- On Wednesday, the State of Texas is scheduled to execute a convicted murderer despite arguments from his attorneys that he is too mentally ill to be put to death.
Scott Panetti, 56, was convicted of the 1992 murders of his mother-in-law and father-in-law, after a trial that made headlines for Panetti's odd behavior. Panetti's name is on one of the key United States Supreme Court cases establishing the standards under which mentally ill people can be executed.
Panetti had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic in his twenties, was prescribed high doses of powerful anti-psychotic medications, and had been hospitalized over 12 times for delusions and psychotic episodes. The murders were brutal and bloody, and Panetti held his estranged wife and young daughter, spattered with the blood of his victims, hostage for hours after killing his in-laws before finally surrendering to police the next morning.
Panetti requested to represent himself at his trial. The court held a competency hearing, and despite finding that Panetti was suffering from a "fragmented personality, delusions, and hallucinations," the court still ruled that he was competent to represent himself.
Panetti wore a cowboy suit with a purple handkerchief to court and attempted to subpoena John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ as witnesses. He admitted that he had committed the murders, but argued that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. As per standard procedure, the court appointed "standby counsel" to observe and assist Panetti, and they reported that his behavior, both in court and privately was "scary," "bizarre," and "trance-like," making the trial a "judicial farce," according to a report by the New York Times. A long article by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel describes more detail about Panetti's bizarre actions during the trial, including using the name of an alter-ego, "Sarge," drawing cartoons on legal documents, pointing an invisible gun at the jury, and berating his wife with odd, babbling statements during his cross-examination of her.
The jury convicted Panetti of capital murder and he was sentenced to death. Years of appeals ensued and at one point in February 2004, he was only a day away from a scheduled execution when a federal judge issued a stay, holding his execution until it could be determined whether executing him would violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Eventually the case made its way to the United States Supreme Court. That case, Panetti v. Quarterman, decided in 2007, changed the standard for mental illness for executing death row inmates. Previously, the Court allowed mentally ill inmates to be executed if they had a threshold understanding that they were going to be executed and why. Instead, the Court ruled that it was necessary to prove that the inmate must have a "rational understanding" of why he was being executed, reasoning that the Eighth Amendment forbids executing the insane, because it offends human decency and does not serve the goals of retribution or deterrence. "The potential for a prisoner's recognition of the severity of the offense and the objective of community vindication are called into question, however, if the prisoner's mental state is so distorted by a mental illness that his awareness of the crime and punishment has little or no relation to the understanding of those concepts shared by the community as a whole," wrote the Court.
An expert who had examined Panetti testified that he believed that he was on death row as part of the "spiritual warfare" between "demons and the forces of the darkness and God and the angels and the forces of light." Panetti said that he understood that the state claimed he was being executed because of the murders, but believed that was an excuse, to cover up the real motivation: to stop him from preaching about the Bible.
The Court sent the case back to the lower courts to determine if Panetti met this new standard, and so far, his appeals have been unsuccessful. Earlier this month in a 5-4 vote, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Panetti's request for a new evaluation, and his execution remained on the calendar. Panetti's attorneys argued that it had been seven years since Panetti's last mental health evaluation, and that he has been showing increasingly delusional behavior while on death row, according to NBC News. One of his attorneys, Kathryn Kase, told NBC News, "He cannot appreciate why Texas seeks to execute him. You have to have a rational as well as factual understanding of why you're being executed." The prosecutors countered that Panetti has had years to arrange new evaluations and pointed to the testimony of their experts, who have voiced suspicions that Panetti was faking some of his bizarre behavior. The Journal Sentinel interviewed Panetti in 1999, and reported that he told them he knew he was mentally ill but was "babbling nonsensically" during most of the interview, flexing his muscles and claiming that he had been recruited by the Green Bay Packers to play football.
Panetti is scheduled to be executed on at 6:00 p.m. Central Time on Wednesday, December 3rd, at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. Over 75,000 people have signed a petition asking Governor Rick Perry to commute his sentence to life in prison without parole, and his attorneys are still trying to file last minute appeals.
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http://rt.com/usa/210571-texas-execution-mentally-ill/
Lawyers ask federal court to halt execution of schizophrenic man in Texas
December 02, 2014
In a final effort to prevent the lethal injection of Scott Panetti, lawyers have asked the US Supreme Court to halt the Texas execution and determine whether mentally ill people should be exempt from the death penalty.
Panetti is scheduled to be put to death on Wednesday for the 1992 murders of his in-laws, Joe and Amanda Alvarado.
But his defense team believes that since Panetti's schizophrenia diagnosis in 1978 and subsequent treatment, the mentally ill patient should instead be locked away for life. Another appeal for Panetti asks for an execution delay so a new round of competency evalutions can take place. That request is currently pending before a federal appeals court.
There is "no doubt" that 56-year-old Panetti was severely mentally ill "before, during and after the crime for which he has been sentenced to death," attorneys Gregory Wiercioch and Kathryn Kase told the justices, as quoted by AP. "And Mr. Panetti's mental state has further deteriorated since his last evaluation in 2007."
"Imposition of the death penalty on people with severe mental illness, as with people with intellectual disability, does not serve the two goals of deterrence and retribution because of their reduced moral culpability," Panetti's lawyers argued to the court on Monday.
State prosecutors are adamant that Panetti is faking his symptoms; they say he is sane to a degree, as he understands that he is being executed as punishment for shooting his wife's parents to death in 1992.
While his medical records contain indications of mental illness, they "strongly indicate rational awareness of his impending execution and the reason for it," Ellen Stewart-Klein, an assistant Texas attorney general, told the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, AP reported. "Panetti's mental status has at best been severely exaggerated by his counsel," she said.
At his 1995 trial, the paranoid schizophrenic appeared before the court wearing a western cowboy costume, insisting that he defend himself without counsel. He shocked the jury once more when he attempted to subpoena the Pope, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ, and over 200 witnesses as part of his insanity defense plea.
Ten years ago, in February 2004, Texas tried to execute Panetti, but a federal judge placed the death date on hold to consider whether Panetti's execution would violate the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The US Constitution forbids the execution of severely mentally ill individuals who do not understand the reason for their punishment.
However, Texas continued to pursue Panetti's execution. Records indicate that his case has gone to the Supreme Court at least five times since his 1995 conviction and sentence. No court has ruled that Panetti was or is incompetent or insane. In 2013, the Fifth Circuit found him competent to be executed.
Also on Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles refused Panetti's clemency petition for his death sentence to be commuted to life in prison, and refused to delay his execution for 180 days. This comes after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals – the state's highest court – voted 5-4 to deny Panetti's appeal for a final time.
His landmark case has drawn attention to what mental health and human rights advocates call a profound injustice. In a final plea for justice by Penneti's sister, which was signed by more than 90,000 people, Victoria describes her brother as a “paranoid schizophrenic.”
“In 1986, Scott first succumbed to the delusion that he was engaged in spiritual warfare with Satan. He became obsessed with the idea that the devil was in the house. He engaged in a series of bizarre behavior to exorcize his home, including burying furniture in the backyard because he thought the devil was in it,” Victoria Penneti wrote.
The petition on Change.org created a storm of condemnation.
“It is patently wrong to execute someone with such a profound mental illness,” Anna Chestnutt from the UK wrote as part of the filed online petition.
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http://sputniknews.com/us/20141202/1015409894.html
UN Experts Urge US, Texas Authorities Not To Execute Mentally Ill Prisoner
December 2, 2014
It is a violation of death penalty safeguards to impose capital punishment on individuals suffering from psycho-social disabilities, a UN human rights expert said the day before a mentally ill prisoner is set to be executed in Texas.
UNITED NATIONS, December 2 (Sputnik) — The day before Scott Panetti, a mentally ill prisoner, is set to be executed in Texas, United States, two UN human rights experts on Tuesday urged the authorities to call off the planned killing.
In a statement released on the United Nations Human Rights website the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns and the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, Juan E. Mendez "urged the United States Government and the authorities of the State of Texas to halt the execution of Scott Panetti, a prisoner with proven psycho-social disabilities."
"It is a violation of death penalty safeguards to impose capital punishment on individuals suffering from psycho-social disabilities. Implementing the death penalty under these conditions may amount to an arbitrary execution," Heyns said as quoted in the statement.
The UN said that Panetti was hospitalized between 1981 and 1992 for several mental illnesses, including chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia, depression, brain dysfunction, delusions, auditory hallucinations, and homicidal ideation towards his family. In September 1995, he was sentenced to death for killing his parents-in-law in Gillespie County, Texas, on 8 September 1992.
For two decades, Panetti has appealed the courts' decisions on the basis of his competence to be executed, based on various expert assessments of his serious mental health conditions. However, his death sentence has been upheld despite a federal ban on such executions.
"I am seriously concerned that Scott Panetti's capital trial, held in 1995 after an authorization to waive his right to counsel and to represent himself, despite his severe mental health condition, may have influenced the subsequent decisions of the courts," UN expert Heyns said, adding that the death penalty may only be imposed when the guilt of the person charged is based upon clear and convincing evidence, leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts.
UN Special Rapporteur on torture Mendez noted that enforcing the death penalty on persons with mental disabilities violates the international prohibition of torture and other inhuman punishment. "There is no doubt that it is inherently cruel and unworthy of civilized societies to execute persons with mental disabilities." Mendez said.
Earlier on Tuesday Huffington Post reported that a group of US conservative leaders including the former Attorney General of the state of Virginia Ken Cuccinelli, addressed Texas Governor Rick Perry asking him to commute Panetti's sentence to life in prison.
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Texas’ Mental Health Fail
By Sarah Griffith Lund, December 1, 2014
There’s major concern by mental health advocates that Texas Governor Rick Perry plans to move forward with executing Scott Panetti, a man with severe and chronic mental illness. It’s undeniable that Panetti suffers from schizophrenia and that his mental illness is a significant disability. There is no doubt that his severe brain disease was a contributing factor to his ending up on Texas’ death row.
However, I don’t think we should ask Governor Perry to halt the execution. That’s not asking for enough.
The problem is not that Texas plans to execute a man with a long history of severe mental illness. The problem is that we criminalize people with mental illness instead of getting them treatment and resources they need for recovery.
People with brain diseases should not be sentenced to death where the clear goal is not rehabilitation, but extermination. The fact that death row often resembles an acute-care psychiatric unit means that we’ve lost our moral grounding and have failed both justice and public healthcare in America.
Twelve years ago I watched as my mentally ill cousin was executed by the state of Missouri. The execution itself was a medical procedure because lethal injection requires a nurse’s care. In the hour prior to the execution I overheard the nurse ask my cousin if he wanted something to “calm his nerves.”
I bet Scott Panetti will get his psych meds, too, right before they kill him. After all, you wouldn’t want him to have a psychotic episode triggered by an upcoming execution, would you? That would be inhumane and barbaric.
Let’s not lose sight of the real problem: people with severe mental illness and criminal behavior need treatment and recovery from organic brain diseases, not punitive institutionalization and execution.
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CRIME AND COURT ROUNDUP: Hayward man scheduled to be executed Wednesday in Texas
By Herald Newsroom Today at 9:27 a.m.
Hayward native Scott Panetti is scheduled to be put to death at six p-m Wednesday in Texas, where he was convicted of killing his ex-wife's parents in 1992. Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals voted 5-to-4 to deny a final state appeal in the case. It remains before the federal courts, after the U-S Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Panetti was not examined adequately to determine if he was suitable for execution due to mental illnesses first diagnosed in the mid-1970's. Panetti, who's now 56, was a day away from execution in 2004 when a federal judge agreed to consider whether the death penalty would violate his right against cruel-and-unusual punishment. The state has long argued that Panetti is sane enough to understand why he's being put to death. Panetti was found guilty of killing Joe and Amanda Alvarado at their home in Fredericksburg Texas. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says 75-thousand people have signed petitions asking Texas Governor Rick Perry to commute the sentence, and send Panetti to prison for life without parole. Former presidential candidate Ron Paul is among the signers. Panetti was an all-star football player at Poynette High School, and was hospitalized 15 times for schizo-phrenia before the killings. The case has bounced back and forth between the U-S Supreme Court and lower courts.
About 400 people attended a weekend fund-raiser for the family of Laylah Peterson. She's the five-year-old Milwaukee girl who was killed November 6th when two men fired shots into her grandparents' home. The benefit was held in Menomonee Falls. It included a silent auction which included autographed basketball shoes from Milwaukee Bucks' rookies Jabari Parker and Johnny O'Bryant. Police said Laylah was sitting on her grandfather's lap watching T-V when numerous shots were fired into the home -- and one of those bullets hit her. The money that raised on Saturday is expected to cover Laylah's funeral, plus therapy for her family. Anything left over will go into a trust fund for the girl's sister -- who was also watching T-V at the time of the shootings, but escaped physical injury.
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A 45-year-old Neenah man is facing possible charges in a drunk driving crash that killed a passenger. Kaukauna Police said 44-year-old Heidi Jetty of Winneconne died after being taken to a hospital. The one-vehicle crash happened on Saturday. The driver was treated at a hospital, and was then taken to the Outagamie County Jail where he was booked for homicide by drunk driving. The crash remains under investigation.
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One person was killed in a traffic crash in eastern Wisconsin early yesterday. Winnebago County sheriff's officials cited icy roads and excessive speed as factors in the crash, which occurred in the town of Wolf River on County Trunk "H" around five a-m yesterday. No one was else was in the vehicle at the time. The fatal victim's name was not immediately released.
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Authorities in central Wisconsin are warning folks about two more scams -- one we've seen before in other parts of the state, and one that's been tried-and-true for years. The Marathon County Crime-Stoppers' program said one scam involves fake I-R-S agents who try to convince people they're behind on their taxes -- and they could be hit with tax evasion charges if they don't send Green-Dot Money Paks. Authorities have said before those packs are nearly impossible to track. The other scam targets older people -- one that's worked for a long time. The recipient is told that a grandchild is in jail, and they need two-thousand dollars to get out -- and, oh yes, send a Green Dot Money-Pak. Marathon County Sheriff Scott Parks says anyone who gets calls like that should hang up and call law enforcement.
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A 17-year-old from Jackson was killed in a one-vehicle weekend crash near Beaver Dam. Dodge County authorities said the teen was a passenger in a vehicle that veered into a gravel shoulder, went airborne, bounced off the roadway, went airborne again, and rolled over. Officials said the driver, a 17-year-old from West Bend, was expected to survive. The crash happened Saturday on Dodge County Trunk "E" in the town of Beaver Dam. It remains under investigation.
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http://www.ohchr.org/FR/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=15369&LangID=E
Death row: UN experts urge US authorities to stop execution of Scott Panetti, a mentally ill prisoner
GENEVA (2 December 2014) – Two United Nations human rights experts on arbitrary executions and on torture today urged the United States Government and the authorities of the State of Texas to halt the execution of Scott Panetti, a prisoner with proven psychosocial disabilities, due to be carried out on Wednesday 3 December.
“It is a violation of death penalty safeguards to impose capital punishment on individuals suffering from psychosocial disabilities,” the UN Special Rapporteurs on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, warned. “Implementing the death penalty under these conditions may amount to an arbitrary execution.”
“International law considers the imposition and enforcement of the death penalty on persons with mental disabilities a violation of the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment,” the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, Juan E. Méndez, added.
Mr. Panetti was reportedly hospitalized between 1981 and 1992 for several mental illnesses, including chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia, depression, brain dysfunction, delusions, auditory hallucinations, and homicidal ideation towards his family. In September 1995, he was sentenced to death for killing his parents-in-law in Gillespie County, Texas, on 8 September 1992.
“I am seriously concerned that Scott Panetti’s capital trial, held in 1995 after an authorization to waive his right to counsel and to represent himself, despite his severe mental health condition, may have influenced the subsequent decisions of the courts,” Heyns said.
For two decades, Mr. Panetti has appealed the courts’ decisions on his competence to be executed, based on various expert assessments of his serious mental health conditions. However, his death sentence was upheld despite claims that he had psychosocial disabilities, and the existence of a federal ban on such executions.
“The death penalty may only be imposed when the guilt of the person charged is based upon clear and convincing evidence, leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts, as required by the ‘Safeguards guaranteeing protection of the rights of those facing the death penalty,’” Special Rapporteur Heyns recalled.
“There is no doubt that it is inherently cruel and unworthy of civilized societies to execute persons with mental disabilities,” added Mr. Méndez.
“Given the irreversible nature of the death penalty, we urgently appeal to the Government of the United States and the state of Texas to find a way to stop the scheduled execution, and we hope that serious consideration will be given to commuting the sentence,” the UN Special Rapporteurs said.
ENDS
The Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns (South Africa), is a director of the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa and Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Pretoria, where he has also directed the Centre for Human Rights, and has engaged in wide-reaching initiatives on human rights in Africa. The expert has advised a number of international, regional and national bodies on human rights issues. Learn more, visit: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Detention/Pages/WGADIndex.aspx
Juan E. Méndez (Argentina) was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in November 2010. He is independent from any government and serves in his individual capacity. Mr. Méndez has dedicated his legal career to the defense of human rights, and has a long and distinguished record of advocacy throughout the Americas. Learn more, log on to: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Torture/SRTorture/Pages/SRTortureIndex.aspx or http://antitorture.org/
UN Human Rights, country page – United States of America: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/ENACARegion/Pages/USIndex.aspx
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Xabier Celaya, UN Human Rights – Media Unit (+ 41 22 917 9383 / xce...@ohchr.org<mailto:xce...@ohchr.org>)
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