Stage Seven

In 1992, Scott Panetti killed his mother-in-law and his father-in-law, the parents of his second wife, Sonja Alvarado. He then held his wife and daughter hostage for the night, and surrendered to police the next morning. Three years later, Panetti was tried in a Texas state court for capital murder. Scott Panetti was scheduled to be executed on February 5, 2004 in Texas, but was granted a 60-day stay on February 4, 2004. Now we fast forward to over a decade later, Texas has now set an execution date of Dec. 3, 2014, for Panetti following the U.S. Supreme Court declining to review a lower court's ruling allowing his execution to go forward. With that said, if the state continues forth with this execution, a miserable spectacle of a trial will have led to one of the most outrageous executions of our time. The TexasTribune acknowledged the latest update of the case, "with the 6-3 ruling on Wednesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals thwarted the latest effort to stay the schizophrenic death row inmate’s execution." There's no question that Panetti must be incarcerated for his actions in the early 90's, however, his execution would be immoral and serve no purpose, either in retribution or to prevent similar crimes. Either the courts must step in to stay this travesty or Gov. Rick Perry must change Panetti's sentence to life. Otherwise, the state will kill an individual who is so ill and delusional that he cannot begin to comprehend his fate. As of now, I don't see either of those things happening to halt the unfortunate fate for Panetti's life with our failed justice system, but at least his attorneys are seeking to get him off death row or, in the very least, to get his execution date postponed so that he can undergo further psychological testing to determine if he's competent to be put to death. According to Kathryn Kase, one of Panetti's lawyers, "He cannot appreciate why Texas seeks to execute him. You have to have a rational as well as factual understanding of why you're being executed." A diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Panetti had been hospitalized for mental illness more than a dozen times within the decade leading up to the September 1992 killings of the Alvarados. And now Panetti, who believes that Satan, working through the state of Texas, is trying to kill him to stop him from preaching Christ's word to other inmates is just days away from death by lethal injection, unless his execution is stopped. There are multiple legal safeguards that are meant to protect the inherent dignity and civil rights of Americans with mental illness when they come into the criminal justice system. Majority of people assume that the United States doesn't execute people with severe mental illness. They wrongly presume that people with mental illness are protected by our laws. Unfortunately, as Panetti's case illustrates, the safeguards can and do fail. We do execute people with severe mental illness. And now Panetti, 56, may be the next horrifying example of this failure.