Supreme Court grants cert on capital mental illness issue

Supreme Court grants cert on capital mental illness issue

As detailed here at SCOTUSblog, the Supreme Court today granted cert on seven cases. One of the group is a Texas capital case. Here is Lyle Denniston's description:

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.

Panetti is an interesting grant given that, in the wake of Atkins and its prohibition on executing persons with mental retardation, many anti-death-penalty groups have been arguing for a prohibition on executing persons with serious mental illness. Since the facts in Panetti seem somewhat quirky, I would guess that the cert grant is designed to allow the Supreme Court to explore more generally the issue of applying the death penalty to persons with mental illnesses.

UPDATE: Linda Greenhouse has this strong coverage of the Panetti grant in this New York Times article.

January 5, 2007 at 06:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)