United States Supreme Court Decision

United States Supreme Court Decision Brief

SCOTT LOUIS PANETTI, Petitioner-Appellant, versus DOUG DRETKE, DIRECTOR, TEXAS DEPARTMENT of CRIMINAL JUSTICE, CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS DIVISION, Respondent-Appellee.

UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT

PRIOR HISTORY: Appeal from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, 448 F. 3D 815.

COUNSEL: For SCOTT LOUIS PANETTI, Petitioner - Appellant: Keith S. Hampton, Hampton Law Office, Austin, TX; Gregory W. Wiercioch, Texas Defender Service, San Francisco, California.

For DOUG DRETKE, DIRECTOR, TEXAS DEPARTMENT of CRIMINAL JUSTICE, CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS DIVISION, Respondent - Appellee: Tina J. Dettmer, Office of the Attorney General, Postconviction Litigation Div, Austin, TX.

Scott Louis Panetti was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death by a Texas state court. Panetti sought habeas corpus relief from the District Court, which denied his request. Panetti appealed the District Court's decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which affirmed the District Court's decision. Panetti now seeks review of the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Panetti was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife's parents. Though Panetti has never been found incompetent by any tribunal, he challenges his pending execution on the grounds that he is incompetent to be executed, on the basis of his mental illness. There is no question that Panetti suffered from a mental illness. Throughout his lifetime, he had been repeatedly hospitalized and treated for an extensive array of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis, auditory hallucinations, and delusions of persecution and grandiosity. However, the state court not only determined that Panetti was competent to stand trial, but also that his mental illness did not rise to the level of legal insanity. There was evidence that suggested Panetti carefully planned the murder of his in-laws, and was able to differentiate between right and wrong while committing those murders.

Panetti's wife Sonja left him several weeks before the murders because of violence and threats by Panetti. Sonja obtained a protective order against him and moved in with her parents, Joe and Amanda Alvarado. On September 8, 1992 Panetti went to his home and shot his in-laws in front of his wife and child. He did this after preparing for battle by shaving his head, dressing in camouflage, arming himself with two guns, and traveling to his in-laws' home. After killing his in-laws, Panetti took his wife and child hostage and engaged in a standoff with police.

Because of Panetti's history of mental illness, the judge in his murder trial ordered a competency evaluation. The evaluating psychiatrist determined that Panetti was competent to stand trial. In addition, Panetti was found competent in a competency trial, though his first competency trial ended in a mistrial. While some mental health professionals believed him to be incompetent, others disagreed, thinking that he was actually malingering. After his competency trial, Panetti stopped taking his antipsychotic medication. Panetti represented himself before the trial court, where he exerted a defense of not-guilty by reason of insanity. Despite exhibiting extremely erratic and irrational behavior, Panetti was found guilty by the trial court and sentenced to death. Less than two months after Panetti was sentenced to death, the same trial court determined that he was incompetent to waive the appointment of state habeas counsel and denied his request to waive his right to direct appeal. Post-conviction, Panetti appeared convinced that his execution was part of a Satanic conspiracy and evidenced a belief in other religious conspiracies.

Panetti alleges that the legal issue to be resolved is whether the Eighth Amendment permits the execution of a death row inmate who possesses factual awareness of the reason for his execution but who, because of severe mental illness, has a delusional belief as to why the State is executing him, and thus does not understand that his execution is intended to seek retribution for his capital crime. The State alleges that the issues are: (1) whether the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) require deference to the state court's determination that Panetti is competent to be executed -- and thereby statutorily preclude Panetti's request for federal habeas relief and (2) whether the Eighth Amendment prohibits execution of a validly convicted capital murderer who, despite his mental illness, knows that he committed capital murder and has been found as a factual matter to have the capacity to recognize that the death penalty will kill him and was the result of his murder conviction. However, the actual issue is whether the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments require that a mentally ill person have a rational understanding of his death sentence in order to be executed. This Court holds that a person must have a rational understanding of his death sentence in order to be executed and orders a stay of Panetti's death sentence.

Before explaining this Court's holding, it is important to address an issue posed by the State. The State alleged that the AEDPA statutorily precluded Panetti's request for federal habeas relief. However, habeas corpus is a constitutionally protected right, which cannot be abrogated by anything less than a Constitutional Amendment. Therefore, because Congress could not circumvent the Constitution's habeas corpus guarantee with a statute, an interpretation of the AEDPA is not necessary in order to establish that Panetti has the right to seek habeas corpus relief. Even if this Court agreed with earlier decisions that determined that the AEDPA could constitutionally limit a defendant's right to seek habeas corpus relief, other earlier decisions have interpreted the AEDPA to require that defendants receive certain due process rights. The most basic due process rights include the right to a fair trial and the right to participate in one's own defense, both of which are called into question by the facts of this case, which suggest that Panetti may have been incompetent during his murder trial. At the very least, this Court is compelled to determine Panetti's competency during his trial.

There is a tremendous amount of controversy surrounding the death penalty, and the Court has not been immune from this controversy. From the first time the Court acknowledged that "death is different," the Court has struggled to determine when the death penalty is appropriate. This struggle has led to a non-linear evolution in death penalty jurisprudence, and even to a temporary moratorium on the death penalty in the United States. While the evolution of the death penalty has not been linear, one thing that the Court has made clear is that the death penalty's applicability is to be determined using contemporary standards, not based on outdated or archaic conventions. This has led to a refinement of the death penalty, which has restricted its use on certain populations, including children and mentally retarded. Most importantly, the Court has determined that it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment to execute the insane.

The State makes the argument that Panetti's degree of mental illness would have been insufficient to spare him from execution under the common law at the time that the Eighth Amendment was drafted. However, this argument simply does not bear up under the overwhelming evidence regarding Panetti's mental illness. All of the experts agree that Panetti suffers from serious mental illness, and the evidence of his mental illness predates Panetti's criminal acts by at least a decade. Furthermore, there is no question that Panetti has been unmedicated since before the beginning of his criminal trial and that schizophrenics decompensate over time when not medicated. The State seems to suggest that the fact that Panetti was able to, when treated and medicated, function as a normal human being, exempted him from the minimal protections afforded to the mentally ill under the common law. What the State ignores is that the conditions of psychiatric evaluation and medication have changed dramatically since that time period, and that a person suffering from the same diseases that would have completely debilitated an individual two centuries ago can oftentimes function much like a normal person under appropriate medication and monitoring.

The problem suggested by the State is that if Panetti is malingering, vacating his death sentence will open the door to similar death penalty challenges. The State even attempts to suggest that several death-row inmates would be able to defeat their sentences because of the correlation between mental illness and residency on death-row. However, what the State ignores is that it is that correlation that should and does disturb the Court. Although statutory provisions regarding sanity vary, it is clear that contemporary standards reject the execution of the insane. Therefore, a substantiable claim of insanity should be sufficient to get a defendant's death sentenced reviewed. The fact is that only a very few death row inmates will be able to provide the type of evidence of mental illness that Panetti has provided. Panetti's history of mental illness predates his crime by over a decade. In addition, Panetti's history of mental illness includes diseases that, by definition, make the sufferer irrational and incapable of determining right from wrong, which goes to the essence of the common law definition of insanity.

However, this Court also recognizes that mental illness oftentimes differs from other immutable characteristics, such as mental retardation and age, in that a defendant oftentimes has the ability to control mental illness through medical interventions. While there is tremendous evidence of Panetti's deteriorated mental state, there is very little evidence to support Panetti's assertions that he was insane at the time of the murders. Though there are serious questions regarding Panetti's competency to stand trial, much less his competency to represent himself in that trial, there simply does not appear to be any evidence that he was insane at the time of the murders. Panetti engaged in preparations that were rationally aimed at accomplishing the murder of his in-laws, but was able to refrain from killing his wife and child. In addition, he engaged in a stand-off with police that resulted in him escaping the stand-off without being killed and without the deaths of additional people. This behavior certainly demonstrates a greater level of competency than Panetti's post-conviction behavior and suggests that Panetti was not insane at the time of the commission of the crimes. The problem is that, because Panetti is not currently competent and may not have been competent at the time of the trial, it is impossible to determine whether or not Panetti should have been found not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial. It is simply impossible to know who is correct: the experts who believe that Panetti is malingering or the ones who believe he is suffering from a severe psychiatric disorder which prevents him from understanding the reason behind his execution.