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In 2007, the Supreme Court case Panetti v. Quarterman set the standard for when the government can execute someone with severe mental illness.
Fifteen years later, the state of Texas is still trying to execute the petitioner in that case, Scott Panetti. This week, a federal judge is hearing testimony over whether Panetti meets the standard the Supreme Court outlined in his case in 2007: Does he have a rational understanding of the link between his crime (the 1992 murder of his in-laws) and the impending punishment?
Panetti’s lawyers say no. He’s been diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, and medical records from the past 40 years document a long series of struggles with delusions, paranoia, hallucinations, and disordered thinking. Between 1981 and 1992, Panetti was hospitalized 14 times for symptoms related to schizophrenia and manic depression. His delusions are often religious in nature, and according to his lawyers, he believes he is “engaged in spiritual warfare with Satan.” Greg Wiercioch, the lead counsel on his case, told me that Panetti believes God has put him on death row to save the souls of fellow prisoners and correctional staff, and to preach the gospel of Jesus. His execution, in his mind, is part of a conspiracy to prevent him from continuing to spread the word of God and also to cover up evidence of a pedophilia ring in Fredericksburg, Texas, which he believes his in-laws were involved in before his death. At his 1995 trial and sentencing, during which Panetti was inexplicably allowed to represent himself, he showed up dressed as a cowboy and attempted to subpoena the pope, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. “His mental illness is almost like a prism that’s distorting and bending reality,” said Wiercioch, who has represented Panetti since 2003. “Everything that goes through the prism of his mental illness is distorted and bent in a way that no longer makes sense.”
In its 1986 ruling in Ford v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court determined that it was unconstitutional to execute someone who was “insane.” The ruling drew on the Eighth Amendment and common law, concluding that “such an execution has questionable retributive value, presents no example to others, and thus has no deterrence value, and simply offends humanity.” The decision quotes the Latin phrase Furiosus solo furore punitur: Madness is its own punishment. But, as the New York Times pointed out in 2006, the ruling “left much unclear.” Who qualified as insane? In 2007, Panetti’s Supreme Court case served, in theory, to provide an answer.
But rational understanding—which the court settled on despite the objection of then-Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, who said it “invites real abuse”—is itself a fuzzy standard. It requires the criminal justice system to do something it is generally unequipped to do: acknowledge the nuance and complexity of mental illness. A recent analysis of federal appellate cases in which defendants argued they were ineligible to be executed under the standard outlined in Panetti found that the standard was “an illusion, little more than a paper victory for defendants with serious mental illness”: The researchers found only one case in which a federal circuit court agreed there had been a Panetti violation. “Prior to Panetti,” they wrote, “we know that that the Fifth Circuit had not found a single death row defendant … to be incompetent to be executed in the two decades since the court had decided Ford v. Wainwright. … [L]ittle has changed since.”
This should be alarming: Even the few safeties we have in place to—theoretically—protect people with serious mental illness from cruel and unusual punishment are failing. These standards are critical to, in the words of Justice Thurgood Marshall in Ford, “protect the dignity of society itself from the barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance.”
Among the evidence that the Texas judge will hear this week in Panetti’s competency hearing is the opinion of the state’s expert that Panetti has “some degree of rational understanding of the connection between the crime and the punishment.” This standard—”some degree”—was articulated by the U.S. District Court itself when it ordered the evidentiary hearing. But Panetti’s lawyers argue that “some degree” is not sufficient under the 2007 Supreme Court ruling—instead, he needs a complete rational understanding. Panetti’s thought process—like anyone’s—is complex: It’s easy, as the Marshall Project reported in 2014, to pull out “moments of lucidity.” Panetti may not always meet a caricatured image of mental illness; it’s not as if he’s “foaming at the mouth and raving at the moon 24 hours a day,” Wiercioch told me. And it’s for that very reason that “The Supreme Court recognized that mental illness is not binary, such that a person is entirely healthy, or so insane that he or she can do nothing. It exists on a continuum, like physical illness,” Panetti’s lawyers wrote in a recent court filing. “An isolated thread of understanding does not diminish the pervasiveness and chronicity of psychotic symptoms.”
They’re right: Mental illness isn’t a binary. But the problem is our justice system still hasn’t gotten the memo.
State of Mind is a partnership of Slate and Arizona State University that offers a practical look at our mental health system—and how to make it better.
