Conservative Commentator, Texas Editorial Urge End to Death Penalty for Mentally Ill

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will hear arguments on September 23 regarding Scott Panetti’s competency to be executed. Panetti is a severely mentally ill man who represented himself at his trial wearing a cowboy costume, and attempted to subpoena the Pope, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. As the court prepares to hear Panetti’s case, opinion pieces in two Texas newspapers used it to illustrate larger problems with the death penalty and mental illness. In an op-ed in The Dallas Morning News, conservative commentator Richard Viguerie said Panetti’s execution would not be “a proportionate response to murder,” but “would only undermine the public’s faith in a fair and moral justice system.” He wrote that people with severe mental illness, like juveniles and people with intellectual disabilities, should not be executed because they have diminished capacities to understand the consequences of their actions. “The rationales for the death penalty — retribution and deterrence — simply do not apply to a severely mentally ill individual like Panetti, who believes that a listening device has been implanted in one of his teeth.” Executing Panetti, Viguerie said, would be “a moral failure for conservatives.” A Houston Chronicle editorial discussed Panetti’s case and the case of another mentally ill capital defendant, James Calvert. A Texas court terminated Calvert’s self-representation after, in the words of the editorial, Calvert “took to defending himself with a farcical style that likely did more to hurt than help his case.” Just before the court terminated Calvert’s self-representation, a court deputy administered an electric shock to Calvert, causing him to scream for several seconds. The editorial said that “[t]he ultimate punishment - death - merits our highest standards of care” and that “judges must carefully balance the Sixth Amendment’s right to represent oneself with the guarantee of competent representation.” Calling for the end of the death penalty, the editorial board wrote, “Cases like Calvert and Panetti’s show how something as serious as life and death can easily be turned into a farce.”

In December 2014, Viguerie and more than a dozen other prominent national conservatives wrote a letter to then Texas Governor Rick Perry asking that he commute Panetti’s sentence. The letter said: “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.”

(R. Viguerie, “Richard A. Viguerie: Executing Scott Panetti would be a moral failure for conservatives,” The Dallas Morning News, September 16, 2015; Editorial, “Editorial: End executions,” Houston Chronicle, September 16, 2015.) See Mental Illness and Editorials.