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Supreme Court Sends Back Penry Case For Fourth Death Penalty Sentencing Trial
By Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express
June 26, 2006

HOUSTON, TEXAS--John Paul Penry will likely face a fourth trial to determine whether he has mental retardation and therefore could face the death penalty.

Penry, 50, confessed to raping Pamela Moseley Carpenter, and then stabbing her to death with a pair of scissors in 1979.

But the question of whether Penry has a mental disability that makes him less responsible for his actions has brought the sentencing portion of his case before the U.S. Supreme Court three times. Each time, the high court sent his case back to Texas to be retried, after determining that the trial judges gave confusing or conflicting instructions to their juries.

The most recent time was two weeks ago, when the Justices upheld a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruling made last October, which found that the judge in Penry's 2002 sentencing trial gave improper, confusing instructions to that jury.

The high court's June 11 decision means that Texas prosecutors could hold a fourth trial to determine whether he spends the rest of his life in prison or dies by lethal injection.

Penry's supporters have described him as having "the mind of a 7-year-old", that he believes in Santa Claus and likes to draw with color crayons. His attorneys maintain that he has mental retardation, and spent many of his younger years in a state-run institution. Penry has scored between 51 and 63 on IQ tests, well below the 70 mark considered by most experts to suggest mental retardation.

Prosecutors say he is a manipulative psychopath who pretends to have an intellectual disability in order to avoid execution.

In 1989, the Supreme Court used Penry's case to conclude that executing people with mental retardation does not amount to "cruel and unusual punishment" and should not be banned under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 2002, the same court reversed itself, ruling in the case of Atkins v. Virginia that convicts determined to have mental retardation cannot face execution. However, the Supreme Court did not tell the states how to decide whether a person has the disability.

Of the 399 inmates currently on Texas' death row, only a handful have been behind bars longer than Penry.

At one point in 2000, he came to within three hours of execution before the Supreme Court intervened.

Related:
"High court sends Penry case back for trial" (Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/14803592.htm
"A Death Sentence Courts Can't Seem to Live With" (Los Angeles Times)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/06/red/0626a.htm
"John Paul Penry" (Inclusion Daily Express Archives)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/laws/penry.htm
"The Death Penalty and Mental Retardation" (Inclusion Daily Express)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/laws/deathpenalty.htm

Copyright © 2006 Inonit Publishing
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