A federal judge decided that a Texas death row inmate with a long history of mental illness who tried to call Jesus Christ and John F. Kennedy as witnesses in his trial was not fit to be executed.
Scott Panetti, 65, has been on death row for almost 30 years for ki!!ing his in-laws in front of his wife and young children. He has said that Texas wants to ki!! him to cover up incest, corruption, s*xual abuse, and drug dealing that he has found. He has also said that the devil has “blinded” Texas and is using the state to ki!! him to stop him from speaking and “saving souls.”
In a decision released Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin said that Panetti’s well-known mental illness and confused thinking make it impossible for him to understand why he is being put to death.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that people with intellectual disabilities can’t be put to death, but people with major mental illnesses can still be put to death. But it has been said that a person must be able to understand what is going on in order to be ki!!ed.
“There are several reasons for prohibiting the execution of the insane, including the questionable retributive value of executing an individual so wracked by mental illness that he cannot comprehend the ‘meaning and purpose of the punishment,’ as well as society’s intuition that such an execution ‘simply offends humanity.’ Scott Panetti is one of these individuals,” Pitman wrote in his 24-page ruling.
Panetti’s lawyers have claimed for a long time that he shouldn’t be put to death because he has a 40-year history of severe mental illness, including paranoid and grandiose delusions and hearing voices. Gregory Wiercioch, one of Panetti’s lawyers, said that Pitman’s decision “keeps the state of Texas from taking revenge on a person with a severe form of schizophrenia that makes him see the world wrongly.”
“His symptoms of psychosis interfere with his ability to rationally understand the connection between his crime and his execution. For that reason, executing him would not serve the retributive goal of capital punishment and would simply be a miserable spectacle,” Wiercioch said in a statement.
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The Texas Attorney General’s Office, which said Panetti was fit to be executed during a three-day hearing in October, did not immediately respond to an email asking for a comment on Pitman’s decision. Panetti has already been set to die twice, in 2004 and 2014.
In 1986, the Supreme Court said that the Eighth Amendment says that people who are mentally ill and don’t know what their sentence is can’t be put to death. In 2007, the high court said in a decision about an appeal in Panetti’s case that a mentally ill person must also understand why they are being ki!!ed.
Tim Proctor, a forensic psychologist and expert witness for the state, said at Panetti’s October hearing that he thinks Panetti is “genuinely mentally ill,” but that he also thinks Panetti knows why he is going to be put to death. Panetti was found guilty of ki!!ing Joe Alvarado, 55, and Amanda Alvarado, 56, in September 1992 at their home in Fredericksburg, Texas, in the Texas Hill Country.
Even though Panetti was identified with schizophrenia in 1978 and had been hospitalized for treatment more than a dozen times in the decades before the de@dly shooting, a judge let him be his own lawyer at his 1995 trial. Panetti wore a purple cowboy outfit to his trial, flipped a coin to choose a juror, and said that only a crazy person could show someone was crazy.