Executing the mentally ill: a new Texas cert grant

January 5, 2007

Executing the mentally ill: a new Texas cert grant

The Supreme Court today granted cert. in a potential blockbuster, Panetti v. Quarterman. As noted previously, the Supreme Court generally doesn’t take cases to simply affirm them (it reverses 2 out of 3 capital cases it hears - that is it reverses whatever the Court below did). The issue in Panetti is competency to be executed. The Court’s cert. grant is likely to be narrow, merely to look at the mechanics of executing the mentally ill some two decades after the Court last seriously addressed the issue in Ford v. Waingwright. However, there is another possibility, it may have taken cert to see whether the standard set forth in Ford should be adjusted in light of recent medical advances, as well as other developments such as the Recommendations of the American Bar Association Section of Individual Rights & Responsibilities Task Force on Mental Disability and the Death Penalty (2005), 54 Cath.U.L.Rev. 1115. From the SCOTUSBlog.

Among the newly granted cases is a Texas death row case, testing whether it is unconstitutional to execute an individual who is factually aware of the reason he faces execution, but because of mental illness has a delusion about the state’s actual reason for putting him to death. It is Panetti v. Quarterman (06-6407). Doctors who examined Scott Louis Panetti found him to have a mental disorder, although they concluded that he knew he was to be executed after killing his wife’s parents. But the doctors concluded that Panetti had a personal belief that he was going to be put to death by the state because he was “preaching the gospel” and that the “forces of evil” were set against him. His lawyers claim that he is too mentally unstable to be executed without violating the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The appeal is supported by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. It and Panetti’s petition argue that the lower court decision in his case runs against the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Ford v. Wainwright barring the execution of the mentally ill.

I should note Mr. Panetti’s attorney is Keith Hampton of Austin, Texas & there was an amicus brief on behalf of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill filed by John Blume.

[The Court took no public action on the remand motions in either Brewer v. Quarterman (05-11287) or Abdul-Kabir (formerly Ted Calvin Cole) v. Quarterman (05-11284). As previously discussed those motions were made following the Fifth Circuits en banc holding in Billy Ray Nelson v. Quarterman to allow the lower court a chance to correct its holdings in Brewer & Abdul-Kabir. Although action on the remand motions is possible on Monday, it appears that the remand motion is likely to be denied & the Court may well reverse in both Brewer & Abdul-Kabir given its historic predisposition to, when it grants cert, reverse federal court of appeals in capital cases, especially the Fifth Circuit.]