'Floridly psychotic' Texas inmate's storied history of mental illness likely won't halt his execution

Scott Panetti

Barring the success of last-minute appeals, Scott Panetti, 56, will be executed on 3 December despite clear evidence that he is insane and his original trial was a farce

On Tuesday, the Texas court of criminal appeals, by a 5-4 vote, denied the attorneys’ latest petition for a stay of execution. Panetti’s lawyers had argued that executing a severely mentally ill inmate would violate the eighth and fourteenth amendments and cited new research showing that death sentences are rarely imposed on the mentally-ill and that no “guilty but mentally ill” capital defendant has been sentenced to death in 20 years. As a result of this national consensus, they argued, it would be unconstitutional to impose a punishment that “offends contemporary standards of decency” and as unreasonable to execute the mentally ill as it would be to put to death the intellectually disabled.

Earlier this month, the attorneys sent a petition for clemency to Texas governor Rick Perry and the Texas board of pardons and paroles (PDF). The appeal describes Panetti as “floridly psychotic” and calls his case a “judicial disaster” where “evidence of his incompetency runs like a fissure through every proceeding”. They are awaiting responses.

A Wisconsin-born US Navy veteran, Panetti was first diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978, when he was 20. In the 1980s and early 90s he was hospitalised more than a dozen times for mental illnesses including hallucinations and paranoid delusions. His first wife told hospital workers that he was obsessed with exorcising the devil from his house, a process that involved burying furniture in his yard and nailing the curtains shut. He and Sonja Alvarado had separated about a month before he murdered her parents. She had taken out a protective order against him less than a week before his rampage.

A jury at a competency hearing was unable to decide if he was fit to stand trial, but a different jury at a second hearing decided that he could. Panetti rejected a plea offer of a life sentence and chose to represent himself at his trial in 1995, evidently because of a suspicion of attorneys.

Off medication after experiencing some sort of religious epiphany, at trial he dressed in a purple cowboy suit, made a threatening gesture at the jury and tried to subpoena Jesus, the Pope, John F Kennedy and the actor Anne Bancroft.

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Source: The Guardian, November 25, 2014