Scott Panetti, The Legal Characterizations of Rights of the Mentally Ill, and the U.S. Supreme Court's Involvement in Public Debates About the Abolition of Capital Punishment
Author:
- Michael K. Middleton (University of Utah)
- Marouf A. Hasian, Jr. (University of Utah)
This essay provides a rhetorical analysis of the recent United States Supreme Court case of Panetti v. Quarterman (2007). The authors argue that this key case can be heuristically contextualized as a judicial decision that intervenes in the public and legal debates that are taking place over the nature of the due process procedures that will govern the trial and sentencing of some criminally incompetent defendants. Between 1992 and 2007, Scott Panetti, a mentally unstable criminal defendant, would be tried in Texas for the murder of his two in-laws, and over the years he would become an iconic figure for many "abolitionists." Critics of state capital punishment proceedings tried to use the Panetti case as a rhetorical vehicle for questioning the constitutionality of these types of state proceedings, but Supreme Court's interpretation of the Powell concurring opinion in Ford (1986) signaled the domestication and containment of these aspirations. Panetti would receive individual relief when the Court determined that his lawyers had the legal right to have hearings about his competency, but in the long run the case may be remembered as a decision that focused attention on the communal interest of those who want to defend the retributive goals of the state that was punishing him.