"Panetti's case suggests that our justice system still has trouble dealing appropriately with defendants with severe mental illness," Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine and Law at Columbia University Medical Center Paul Appelbaum told Sputnik Wednesday.
"The trial court's decision to allow a psychotic Panetti to represent himself at trial essentially guaranteed a guilty verdict," Appelbaum stressed.
Panetti, 56 years old, was scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection in Texas on Wednesday evening for shooting his parents in law to death, although he has been diagnosed and repeatedly hospitalized with mental illnesses including chronic schizophrenia, hallucinations and homicidal ideation towards his family.
During Panetti's 1995 trial, he chose to represent himself and claimed that his alternate personality "Sarge" was responsible for the murder of his in-laws in 1992. Panetti was then convicted and sentenced to death.
"If you look at the Scott Panetti case he was allowed to represent himself even though he had been hospitalized for schizophrenia," Advocacy Coordinator at Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty Marc Hyden told Sputnik Wednesday.
"…the criminal justice system allowed him to represent himself even though they knew that he was very mentally ill. They could have overrode his decision to represent himself and they could have forced a counsel to represent him however they chose not to," Hyden added.
In 1986, the US Supreme Court ruled that states could not execute mentally ill inmates whose insanity made them incapable of understanding why they were being put to death. Later in 2002, the high court prohibited the execution of the mentally retarded saying that it violated the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments, but said that the Eighth Amendment needed to be interpreted with "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society," according to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
New York Law School Professor and author of The Death of Punishment, Robert Blecker, told Sputnik Wednesday that the arguments against executing the mentally ill are too broad to determine who deserves to be executed and who does not.
"The sweeping arguments against ever executing "the mentally ill", assuming we accept capital punishment as sometimes appropriate, fail to distinguish those who deserve it from those who don't," Blecker said, adding that "Mental illness constitutes a broad category or cluster of conditions, some of which are morally relevant to punishment, others of which are not".
Blecker stressed that the US justice system fails to explain "why we can punish [and] not merely confine for our protection inside hospitals, but punish these same mentally ill criminals at all".
"If we are committed to having the punishment fit the crime, blanket exclusion for mental illness is not ultimately defensible," Blecker argued.
Hours ahead of Panetti's execution, a US federal appeals court decided to halt the execution of the schizophrenic inmate in order to have more time to consider and further examine his case.
On November 25, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled 5 to 4 against, issuing a stay of execution for US Navy veteran Panetti. Human rights groups, US senators and Panetti's legal team have since petitioned both the governor of Texas Rick Perry and the US Supreme Court to reconsider his execution.
