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TEXAS (USA): COURT HALTS EXECUTION OF SCOTT PANETTI AMID QUESTIONS OF MENTAL HEALTH
December 3, 2014: The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans court has stayed the execution of Scott Panetti in a case that has become a test of issues around executions of the mentally ill. The court postponed the execution, saying that it needed time to consider the larger issues surrounding the case.
The man, Scott Panetti, 56, had been scheduled to be executed on Wednesday in the 1992 slaying of his wife's parents. Panetti's lawyers contend that he has suffered from schizophrenia for more than three decades and on Monday they urged federal courts to intervene on the grounds that putting a mentally ill person to death was unconstitutional and violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The case has drawn an outcry not only from death penalty opponents, but from others who say the execution of a mentally ill person who may not have been aware of his or her own actions crosses a legal threshold that is clearly in violation of the Eighth Amendment. "Widespread and diverse voices agree that Mr Panetti's execution would cross a moral line and serve no retributive or deterrent value," said Kathryn Kase, Panetti's lead lawyer and executive director of the Texas Defender Service, which represents people facing the death penalty. The state, however, contends in legal filings that conversations between Panetti and his parents, secretly taped by prison officials, "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".
According to his lawyers, Panetti first received a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder in 1978, 14 years before killing his in-laws. He was hospitalised 13 times from 1978 to 1991, and in 1986 expressed "fears that the devil is after him", according to a timeline by his lawyers. (Sources: New York Times, 03/12/2014)
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