General
Scott Panetti, 67, at the Center of a Landmark Death Penalty Case, Dies
Diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, he spent 30 years on death row. In 2007, the Supreme Court raised the bar for executing the mentally ill, though Texas still tried to put him to death.
Scott Panetti, a convicted murderer diagnosed with schizophrenia who represented himself at trial in a 1920s-era cowboy costume while attempting to subpoena John F. Kennedy and Jesus as witnesses — and whose execution was stayed by a landmark Supreme Court ruling on capital punishment and mental illness — died on May 26 in a prison hospital in Galveston, Texas. He was 67.
The cause was acute hypoxic respiratory failure, according to the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton.
In the 2007 case Panetti v. Quarterman, the U.S. Supreme Court raised the bar for executing the mentally ill, holding that an individual must have a “rational understanding” of why the state planned to put him to death. (Nathaniel Quarterman was director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.)
An earlier standard required only that a mentally ill person be aware that he or she was going to be executed and why.
“A prisoner’s awareness of the State’s rationale for an execution is not the same as a rational understanding of it,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s 5-4 majority.
Mr. Panetti was first diagnosed with a psychotic disorder when he was 20. He was hospitalized repeatedly for delusions and psychotic episodes over a decade before he killed the parents of his estranged second wife in 1992.
