A man suffering from acute schizophrenia and sentenced to death for the murder of his in-laws in Texas in 1992 cannot be executed because of his illness, a federal court in this American state ruled, after twenty years of debate.
A “profound and severe form of schizophrenia”
A federal judge in Austin, capital of this southwestern US state, concluded in a ruling dated Wednesday that the mental illness of Scott Panetti, 65, sentenced to death in 1995, “did not allow him to rationally understand the reasons for his execution”.
Consequently, “His execution would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.”, adds the judge, Robert Pitman, citing case law established in 1986 by the Supreme Court of the United States. The magistrate explains that he reached these conclusions following three days of hearings on his mental state in October 2022.
This decision “prevents the State of Texas from taking revenge on a person suffering from a profound and severe form of schizophrenia which causes him to perceive the surrounding world in a distorted way”, his lawyer, Gregory Wiercioch, said in a statement on Thursday.
“Incoherent remarks throughout the trial”
Despite a medical consensus on Scott Panetti’s schizophrenia since his youth, the authorities of Texas, one of the states which execute the most convicts each year, have persisted in their desire to apply the death penalty to him since the rejection of his final appeal by the Supreme Court in 2003.
In September 1992, he killed his in-laws in front of his wife, who had just left him, and his three-year-old daughter.
Three years later, the judge authorized him, even against the advice of the prosecution, to defend himself alone. “Dressed in a burgundy cowboy suit, Panetti made incoherent remarks throughout the trial”attempting to cite as witnesses Jesus Christ, the late President John F. Kennedy or Pope John Paul II, recalls Judge Pitman.
2023-09-28 18:04:56
#Judge #blocks #execution #mentally #ill #convict
