Although Scott Panetti has a long his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness and insists that Texas is work­ing in coop­er­a­tion with Satan to exe­cute him as a way to keep him from preach­ing the gospel, a three-judge pan­el of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has declared him sane enough to be exe­cut­ed. The pan­el acknowl­edged that Panetti is men­tal­ly ill and might lack a ratio­nal under­stand­ing of his fate, but main­tained that Panetti is able to under­stand the basis for his exe­cu­tion. The full court will soon decide whether to re-hear Panetti’s case. 

Panetti has been in and out of men­tal insti­tu­tions near­ly all of his life, and he became addict­ed to drugs and alco­hol as a child. When he faced the death penal­ty in 1995 for the mur­der of his estranged wife’s par­ents, he chose to rep­re­sent him­self. During his tri­al, he wore cow­boy out­fits to court, deliv­ered ram­bling mono­logues, put him­self on the wit­ness stand, and sought to sub­poe­na the pope, Jesus, and John F. Kennedy. He also addressed him­self to the jury as ​“the born-again April Fool,” a schiz­o­phrenic healed by God. Jurors quick­ly became alien­at­ed by Panetti’s actions, and it took them lit­tle more than one hour to reject his insan­i­ty defense. They found that he under­stood right from wrong and deserved the death penal­ty. Keith Hampton, Panetti’s attor­ney, said the case has trou­bled him since the tri­al, not­ing, ​“I thought there was no way, no way, no mat­ter how bad things in the state of Texas got, that it would allow some­one in the full flower of schiz­o­phre­nia to rep­re­sent him­self.”

According to the Texas Defender Service, courts have spared the lives of only sev­en inmates based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 rul­ing in Ford v. Wainwright pro­hibit­ing the exe­cu­tion of the insane. Percy Walton, anoth­er men­tal­ly ill inmate, is scheducled for exe­cu­tion in Virginia on June 8.

(New York Times, June 2, 2006). See Mental Illness.

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