Do We Execute Mentally Ill People Or Just Put Them To Sleep?

From Sentencing Law and Policy, Texan Scott Panetti has been found competent for execution by Judge Sam Sparks in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas.  He was convicted of killing his wife's parents.  The problem is that Panetti clearly has a mental illness.  Panetti made the following comments to prosepective jurors as he represented himself during voir dire:

The death penalty doesn’t scare me, sure but not much.  Be killed, power line, when I was a kid. I’ve got my Injun beliefs as a shaman. I sent the buffalo horn to my sister.  Adjustment, Jesus wrote. I was born in the North woods in a reservation hospital and my granddad was a justice of the peace and he sobered up the doctor and the doctor was half sobered and they delivered me and my mom had a bad sickness in her milk and they wondered why I wasn’t dead, and a lot of beatings I took from the kids that show me had prejudice, which I don’t have any prejudice, and they said this about me in the newspapers in the beginning, but I don’t love Injuns and Mexicano, and Mexicano know, but I suffered a lot of reverse prejudice from Colored people, which is rare, darn rare, but I was named “He who doesn’t cry” because I didn’t cry when I should have, and I must admit, though, in Gillespie County Jail when I was in my little suicide box where there was an old boy committed suicide, I went through about a week of pretty much scuba diver’s tears; although, I don’t scuba.

It's not like there is much debate about whether Paretti was "faking" his insanity; in the ten year run-up to his crime, he'd been hospitalized a dozen times for  schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis, auditory hallucinations, and delusions of persecution and grandiosity.  This isn't a regular guy who did a bad thing.  Ask yourself how many people you know with a similar clinical history.

In Panetti v. Quarterman, the Supreme Court held that he could not be executed unless he understood the reason he was facing death. Fair enough.  But trial details like these - and you can find more in the petitioner's brief in the case - really do bring up deeper questions like: why is a person in this condition allowed to represent himself; if he is to represent himself, how can we justify execution as a sanction for the crazy things that happen during trial; does such a trial meet social expectations of fairness; and more generally, is it right for the state to kill a person whose brain functions like this?

The Court has never held the execution of people with mental illness to be unconstitutional.  That's hardly an easy solution anyway.  Such a rule would force courts to face more of the complicated line-drawing debates that have made the the mental retardation issue so tough after Atkins.  But there is something wrong here.   To me, at least, it looks like Texas simply wants to put Panetti to sleep.  If so, the least the state can do is follow national veterinary standards for the practice.

Comments

[Sarah L.]

I find your post deeply objectionable. He is mentally ill, but that does not mean he is an animal, or is like an animal. Since you ask in your post, I will say that I know a number of people with a similar clinical history, and that they are, of course, as human as any other person.

[Dan Filler]

Sarah, if my post conveyed a sense that I consider people with mental illness less than fully human, I'm very sorry - I don't believe that at all. What I meant to argue was that a political system that claims to issue death sentences only where a person has full awareness and comprehension of his crime and where a person receives a fair trial (notwithstanding trial choices made by a person not clearly competent to assess trial strategy) is not meeting those assumptions. RAther, it is is acting outside the bounds of both the retributive assumptions of criminal law and the accuracy assumptions of jury trial findings. In that sense, execution can no longer be seen as an accurate moral response to crime - but rather looks an awful lot like manifestation of a desire to "put down" a person that appears dangerous. (This is in accord with many death penalty experts' who argue that evidence of mental illness increases the likelihood of a death sentence - precisely because jurors view such individuals as the equivalent of wild animals who cannot be rehabilitated, deterred, or even incapacitated.) I am by no means arguing that such defendants are in fact wild animals or are their equivalent.

As to my suggestion that this individual is unusual, I only wanted to indicate to those claiming that this person was malingering, and is not mentally ill, that his diagnoses are consistent with someone who genuinely has a mental illness.

All of this said, I recognize that there is a segment of the disability rights movement that may object to these claims - and indeed rejects Atkins entirely, since the conclusion that people with mental retardation are somehow less culpable for crime can be seen to imply that these folks are somehow less human. I am willing to accept that risk, because I believe that individuals with mental retardation do have a different (not less, but different) decisionmaking process when it comes to criminal acts and have different (and more limited) capabilities to aid in their own defense at trial. Although it varies by case, I suspect that this is usually true of people with signficant mental illness as well.