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Convicted killer Panetti back in court as lawyers argue for support in developing incompetence claim

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This file handout photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Scott Panetti. (AP Photo/Texas Department of Criminal Justice)
This file handout photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Scott Panetti. (AP Photo/Texas Department of Criminal Justice)Uncredited/HOPD

The first time Scott Panetti went to court for the 1992 murders of his wife's parents, he was his own lawyer. He showed up in court dressed as a cowboy, called Jesus Christ as a witness and menacingly pointed at the jury and made gunshot noises. His defense was based on insanity, but jurors didn't buy it. They convicted him of capital murder and sentenced him to die.

In ensuing years, Panetti, now 57, has been in and out of state and federal courts as his lawyers battled to save his life. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case, ruling that convicted killers may not be put to death if they do not understand the reason for their execution. Even so, Panetti seemed inexorably doomed.

Last Dec. 3, he came within hours of execution before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay in response to an appellate claim that a lower court wrongly had denied him access to legal counsel, an investigator and mental health expert to craft an incompetence case.

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Three-judge panel

On Wednesday, Panetti's latest legal team, University of Wisconsin law professor Gregory Wiercioch and Texas Defender Service Executive Director Kathryn Kase, will take the case before a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based court meeting in Dallas.

They hope the panel - Chief Judge Carl Stewart of Shreveport, La., and Judges Priscilla Owen and Patrick Higginbotham of Austin - will return the case to a lower court with orders to provide the requested staff support.

"He's seriously psychotic, no question," the Houston-based Kase said Tuesday. "If Texas executes Scott Panetti, it will demonstrate how little it cares to protect those who are most seriously ill. He has been for 40 years. Texas has again and again sought to kill him, suggesting it does not care to recognize the mental illness that brought him to commit homicide, to death row and now makes him incompetent. He lacks understanding of why the state wants to kill him."

The Texas Attorney General's Office says that Panetti is legally eligible for execution and that his lawyers simply are stalling for time.

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Texas Defender Service spokeswoman Laura Burstein noted that Panetti has not been evaluated since 2007 by mental health experts and that a review of his health records indicates he has deteriorated since that time. Panetti first exhibited signs of mental illness in 1978, she said, and repeatedly had been hospitalized for mental health issues. In 1986, the Social Security Administration determined he was eligible for benefits because he was disabled by schizophrenia, she said.

He was condemned for the Kerr County shooting deaths of his in-laws, Joe and Amanda Alvarado - a crime that occurred just two years after he involuntarily had been committed to a mental health facility after threatening his wife and daughter.

'Hyper-religious'

On death row visits in the weeks leading up to his scheduled December execution, Kase said, Panetti contended that he remotely was being monitored by prison authorities and that he was being persecuted for preaching the Gospel. A four-page affidavit from Dr. Joseph Penn, chief of mental health services for the University of Texas Medical Branch's Correctional Managed Care Division, though, stated that Panetti never had been found seriously disturbed, The Texas Tribune reported.

"It appears that he has always been described as hyper-religious, but that did not appear to be affecting his daily functioning," Penn wrote, assessing the inmate's medical chart. "Mr. Panetti may have had some baseline or chronic residual psychosis or alternately over-valued religious beliefs … but nothing severe enough to warrant treatment with medications."

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Panetti's case gained international attention, with the American Psychiatric Association, Mental Health America, the American Bar Association and more than 60 religious leaders and criminal justice and legal professionals voicing concern about the approaching execution.

"Anyone can do strange things, and if strange things were good enough to get people off death row, believe me, they'd be doing strange things all the time, every day," then-Attorney General Greg Abbott said on a Dallas-Fort Worth radio talk show shortly before Panetti's scheduled execution.

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Allan Turner, senior general assignments reporter, joined the Houston Chronicle in 1985. He has been assistant suburban editor, assistant state editor and roving state reporter. He previously worked at daily newspapers in Amarillo, Austin and San Antonio.