Texas Is About To Execute A Mentally Ill Man Who Thinks He's Being Killed Over A War With 'Demons' | ThinkProgress

In 2007, the Supreme Court held that Texas cannot execute a man if “he suffers from a severe, documented mental illness that is the source of gross delusions preventing him from comprehending the meaning and purpose of the punishment to which he has been sentenced.” Yet the man who won that Supreme Court case, an inmate named Scott Panetti, is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday evening, despite the fact that his mental condition reportedly has deteriorated in the past seven years.
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And yet, the Supreme Court has not extended this rule to severely mentally ill individuals like Panetti. The justices have said that he should not be executed if he suffers from “gross delusions preventing him from comprehending the meaning and purpose of the punishment to which he has been sentenced,” but this is a much weaker protection from execution than the absolute bar the Court announced in cases involving people with intellectual disabilities. Among other things, it hinges upon Panetti’s present state of mind, giving Texas the opportunity to argue that he is currently lucid enough to be killed.

Texas, however, does not appear eager to defend its decision to execute Panetti in court. According to an editorial in the New York Times, no one from the state notified Panetti or his attorneys that he’d been scheduled for execution. The lawyers discovered that their client was about to be killed when they read about it in the newspaper.

Texas Is About To Execute A Mentally Ill Man Who Thinks He's Being Killed Over A War With 'Demons' | ThinkProgress