Scott Panetti, a convicted murderer diagnosed with schizophrenia who represented himself at trial in a 1920s-era cowboy costume while attempting to subpoena John F. Kennedy and Jesus as witnesses — and whose execution was stayed by a landmark Supreme Court ruling on capital punishment and mental illness — died on May 26 in a prison hospital in Galveston, Texas. He was 67.
The cause was acute hypoxic respiratory failure, according
to the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, reported The New York Times.
In the 2007 case Panetti v. Quarterman, the U.S. Supreme Court raised the
bar for executing the mentally ill, holding that an individual must have a
“rational understanding” of why the state planned to put him to death.
(Nathaniel Quarterman was director of the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice.)
An earlier standard required only that a mentally ill person
be aware that he or she was going to be executed and why.
“A prisoner’s awareness of the State’s rationale for an
execution is not the same as a rational understanding of it,” Justice Anthony
Kennedy wrote for the court’s 5-4 majority.
Mr. Panetti was first diagnosed with a psychotic disorder
when he was 20. He was hospitalized repeatedly for delusions and psychotic
episodes over a decade before he killed the parents of his estranged second
wife in 1992.
At a hearing to determine if he was competent to serve as
his own lawyer, his first wife recalled an episode in which he was convinced
that the devil possessed their home, leading him to bury their valuables in the
yard. A jury ruled him competent to represent himself.
In his rambling opening statement at trial in 1995, wearing
a big cowboy hat and a purple bandanna, he showed off a tattoo and spoke of
bull riding and how his father looked like Colonel Sanders.
A standby lawyer at the trial called Mr. Panetti’s courtroom performance “trance-like” and “scary” and the procedure “a judicial farce.” He was found guilty and sentenced to death.
For decades, prosecutors in Texas argued in state and
federal courtrooms that Mr. Panetti was mentally competent to be executed.
Although the Supreme Court made it harder to execute the insane when Mr.
Panetti’s case came before it, the court did not commute his sentence. The case
was returned to lower courts to further weigh his competency.
Testifying for Mr. Panetti, psychiatric experts who had
diagnosed him with schizo-affective disorder said he was under the delusion
that he was being put to death because of a battle between “the forces of the
darkness and God and the angels and the forces of light.”
Texas prosecutors argued that he was faking it. The state
said that secretly recorded conversations with his parents “provide conclusive
evidence that Panetti has a rational understanding of the relationship between
his crime and his punishment,” and that he “has been grossly exaggerating his
symptoms while being observed.”
Greg Abbott, who was Texas’s attorney general then (he is
now governor), said in 2014, “Panetti knows that he killed his in-laws while
his wife and child looked on, and he knows that he has been sentenced to die
for that crime.” The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7-0 against
commuting Mr. Panetti’s death sentence.
Texas’s push to execute him drew a
national outcry. Opponents said imposing the death penalty on an insane
person who had possibly been unaware of his actions crossed a moral line and
violated the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
In December 2014, on the date that Mr. Panetti was scheduled
to be put to death, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals
in New Orleans stayed the execution and ordered a new competency hearing.
In 2022, while the case continued to wend its way through
the courts, Mr. Panetti’s lawyer, Gregory Wiercoch, said, “It is unprecedented
to be litigating on an execution competency claim for 20 years.”
The next year, a federal judge in Austin, Robert Pitman,
ruled that Mr. Panetti should not be executed. “There are several reasons for
prohibiting the execution of the insane,” the judge found, “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.”
Scott Louis Panetti was born on Feb. 28, 1958, in Hayward,
Wis., one of four children of Louis and Yvonne (Empereur) Panetti. At 18, he
enlisted in the Navy, and after an honorable discharge joined his parents in
Fredericksburg, Texas, where they had moved to manage ranches.
He is survived by his sisters Victoria Panetti-Studer and
Jacki Maenius; three children from his first marriage, Chase, Katrina and Mary
Perry; a daughter from his second marriage, Amanda Panetti-Lamb; and three
grandchildren.
In Fredericksburg, west of Austin, Mr. Panetti dressed in buckskin clothes and claimed to have fought in Vietnam, though he was 15 when the United States withdrew its forces from the country. His marriage to Jane Luckenbach ended in divorce. His second marriage, in 1989, to Sonja Alvarado, was rocky. Several times he was involuntarily committed to Kerrville State Hospital in the grip of delusional episodes.
In the summer of 1992, Ms. Alvarado left him, obtained a
restraining order and, with their young daughter, moved to the home of her
parents, Joe and Amanda Alvarado.
Mr. Panetti stalked the family, peering into the windows at
night. One early morning in September 1992, he shaved his head, put on
camouflage clothes and broke a glass door to his in-laws’ home. He shot Mr. and
Mrs. Alvarado at close range with a rifle. He took his wife and daughter
hostage and drove to a friend’s house, where he was living. He changed into a
suit and surrendered to the police.
“I was crying the whole time,” Sonja Alvarado said in an interview 15 years later, when Mr.
Panetti’s case reached the Supreme Court. “He told me he’d heard voices, that
he didn’t know if he was going to kill us or let us go.”
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