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Frontier Justice: Texas Moves to Execute Mentally Ill
Executing the insane took the national spotlight as Scott Louis Panetti, a murder defendant with a long history of mental illness who fired his lawyers and argued his own defense in a cowboy costume, was granted a last-minute stay of execution. “Allowing a schizophrenic in a cowboy costume to represent himself in a death penalty case gives new meaning to the term `frontier justice,’” Jim Marcus, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, a U.S. Justice Fund grantee, told The New York Times on February 4. “Given the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' history of tolerance for defense lawyers who sleep or use drugs and alcohol throughout death penalty trials, however, its laissez-faire approach is hardly surprising,” he said. The New York Times credited Marcus with the paper’s Quote of the Day.
