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The Supreme Court ruling may be a building block to a wider decision on the constitutionality of executing the mentally retarded.
©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 5, 2001
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday overturned the death sentence of a Texas man with the mental age of a 7-year-old, who in 20 years on the state's death row has become a symbol of a growing national debate over executing the mentally retarded.
The justices ruled 6-3 that jurors in Johnny Paul Penry's case received flawed instructions about how they should consider his retardation.
The court's decision probably immediately affects only Penry and a handful of other Texas death row inmates. It does not bear directly on the larger question of whether executing the mentally retarded is unconstitutional. That issue will be addressed in a separate case the justices have agreed to hear later.
The case of Penry has become a rallying point for capital punishment opponents. He was subjected to horrific child abuse and his IQ has been measured at from 51 to 63, with 70 being the generally accepted cutoff for mental retardation.
Monday's decision gives them a symbolic victory at a time when many states are reconsidering their death penalty procedures.
The ruling was the second time the court had set aside Penry's death sentence. In 1989, the court ruled that the Constitution permitted the execution of mentally retarded people, but it overturned Penry's sentence because jury instructions did not sufficiently allow jurors to take account of his retardation.
Whether Penry will now face a third sentencing trial may depend on whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry signs a bill to ban the execution of mentally retarded prisoners. Perry has not said whether he will sign the measure, but the court's ruling Monday has intensified the fight there over the bill.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority, said that the jury instructions for the sentencing phase of Penry's murder trial did not permit the jurors "to make a reasoned moral response" to the mitigating evidence he offered of both his retardation and his history of abuse as a child.
O'Connor said that an instruction at the second sentencing, designed to correct the problem that the court identified in 1989, possibly made the problem even worse by telling the jurors to approach their task in an "internally contradictory" and "illogical" fashion. In authorizing the instructions, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals appeared to have "clearly misapprehended our prior decision," O'Connor wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented in an opinion joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia. Thomas wrote that the jury instructions were unambiguous and that the state court decision upholding them was "objectively reasonable," compelled both by precedent and "common sense."
For its next term, beginning in October, the court has agreed in a case from North Carolina to revisit the issue of whether the Constitution permits the execution of retarded inmates. A decision in that case is unlikely for about a year.
The decision Monday was "a building block to a wider decision next term," Stanley Herr, a past president of the American Association on Mental Retardation and a law professor at the University of Maryland, said Monday. "While the case appears to be narrow, it lays the groundwork" and will help "spur a national movement" against executing retarded people, he said.
When the court last considered the issue 12 years ago, only two of the 38 death penalty states barred execution of the retarded. The number is now 14, and the Florida Legislature has passed a similar bill, now on Gov. Jeb Bush's desk.
The question for the Supreme Court in the case next term is whether "evolving" national standards now indicate that execution of the retarded is cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
Sponsors of the Texas legislation say the state has executed six mentally retarded inmates in recent years, and seven more are awaiting execution.
Penry was four hours from execution last November when the Supreme Court granted a stay. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in the decision the court overturned Monday, had dismissed his petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
Local authorities in Texas expressed disappointment with Monday's ruling. "Our opinion all along is that Johnny Paul Penry deserves the death penalty and that that would have been justice in this case," said William Lee Hohn, first assistant district attorney of Polk County, where Penry was tried.
Penry, who is now 45 years old, was convicted in 1979 of the rape and murder of a 22-year-old woman, Pamela Moseley Carpenter. He was on parole from a previous rape conviction at the time. As an adolescent, he had been institutionalized at the Mexia State School for the Mentally Retarded.
His mother had been institutionalized for mental illness for nearly a year after his birth, and he was described in court documents at his murder trial as having later suffered severe abuse from his mother, who burned him in scalding bath water and forced him to drink his own urine and eat his feces.
- Information from the Washington Post was used in this report.