Scott Panetti, a 65-year-old death row inmate being held in Texas, has been ruled incompetent to stand trial over his long history of mental illness.
has prohibited the death penalty for the intellectually disabled, but not for people with serious mental illness. However, it has ruled that a person must be competent to be executed.
"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 long argued that his 40-year documented history of severe mental illness, including paranoid and grandiose delusions and audio hallucinations, prevents him from being executed.Gregory Wiercioch, one of Panetti’s attorneys, said Pitman’s ruling"prevents the state of Texas from exacting vengeance on a person who suffers from a pervasive, severe form of schizophrenia that causes him to inaccurately perceive the world around him.
"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., which argued during a three-day hearing in October that Panetti was competent for execution, did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment on Pitman’s ruling.
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