WASHINGTON, December 4 (Sputnik) — A US federal appeals court has decided to halt the execution of mentally ill Texas inmate Scott Panetti.
"We are grateful that the court stayed tonight's scheduled execution of Scott Panetti, a man who has suffered from schizophrenia for three decades, for a careful review of the issues surrounding his competency," the attorneys for Panetti Greg Wiercioch and Kathryn Kase said in a joint statement Wednesday after the court's ruling.
"Mr. Panetti has not had a competency evaluation in seven years, and we believed that today's ruling is the first step in a process which will clearly demonstrate that Mr. Panetti is too severely mentally ill to be executed," the Texas inmate's attorneys added.
The fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals halted the execution, which was to be carried out through lethal injection on Wednesday evening, in order to have more time to consider and further examine Panetti's case and mental state.
On November 25, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled 5 to 4 against issuing a stay of execution for US Navy veteran Panetti, who has been diagnosed and repeatedly hospitalized with mental illnesses including chronic schizophrenia, hallucinations and homicidal ideation towards his family.
During Panetti's 1995 trial, he chose to represent himself and claimed that his alternate personality "Sarge" was responsible for shooting to death his parents in law in 1992. Panetti was then convicted and sentenced to death.
