{"id":14205,"date":"2014-11-25T00:49:40","date_gmt":"2014-11-25T08:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=14205"},"modified":"2014-11-25T00:49:40","modified_gmt":"2014-11-25T08:49:40","slug":"texas-is-premeditating-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/25\/texas-is-premeditating-murder\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas Is Premeditating Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have several reasons for opposing capital punishment.  One is that killing a defenseless person is the most hypocritical way there is to tell people not to kill.  Another is that nobody is beyond redemption.  Life without possibility of parole protects the public.  One of the men with whom I do volunteer work will never breathe free air, but he\u2019s completely dedicated to helping other prisoners learn mental fitness to help them from making the same mistakes that he committed on the way to becoming a serial killer.  For this reason, I would not favor the death penalty, even for Republican war criminals, who are responsible for more innocent deaths than any death row prisoner.  In addition, far too many innocents have been executed.  Furthermore, there is no way to administer it fairly.  Texas Republicans know the man they want to kill is insane.  But Republicans are the Party of Death.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"1125Panetti\"On Dec. 3, Texas plans to execute an inmate named Scott Panetti, who was convicted in 1995 for murdering his in-laws with a hunting rifle. There is no question that Mr. Panetti committed the murders. There is also no question that he is severely mentally ill, and has been for decades.<\/p>\n

During his capital murder trial, at which he was inexplicably allowed to represent himself<\/strong>, Mr. Panetti dressed in a cowboy suit<\/a> and attempted to subpoena, among others, John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ. A standby lawyer said his behavior was \u201cscary\u201d and \u201ctrance-like,\u201d and called the trial \u201ca judicial farce.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was not an act. Mr. Panetti, now 56, was first diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 20, and in the years before the murders he was hospitalized several times for delusions and psychotic episodes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In this respect, he is no different from the estimated 350,000 inmates<\/a> around the country with mental illness \u2014 10 times the number of people in state psychiatric hospitals. But Mr. Panetti is not just another insane prisoner; his name is synonymous with the Supreme Court\u2019s modern jurisprudence about mental illness on death row. In Panetti v. Quarterman<\/a>, decided in 2007, the justices held that it is not enough for a defendant simply to be aware that he is going to be executed and why \u2014 the previous standard<\/a> the court had used in permitting the execution of the mentally ill. Rather, he must have a \u201crational understanding\u201d of why the state plans to kill him.<\/p>\n

Noting Mr. Panetti\u2019s \u201cwell-documented history of mental illness,\u201d the court held that capital punishment serves no retributive purpose when the defendant\u2019s understanding of crime and punishment is so distorted that it \u201chas little or no relation to the understanding of those concepts shared by the community as a whole<\/strong>.\u201d\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <NY Times<\/a>><\/p>\n

The Justices did not declare Panetti insane.  They just referred the matter back to the lower court.  Texas courts deferred to Republican blood lust, and unless SCROTUS intervenes, Rick Perry will murder this man on 12\/3.  He and the Texas Republican Party are just drooling for more death.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have several reasons for opposing capital punishment.  One is that killing a defenseless person is the most hypocritical way there is to tell people not to kill.  Another is that nobody is beyond redemption.  Life without possibility of parole protects the public.  One of the men with whom I do volunteer work will never […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}