The legal spaghetti in Panetti

I have had a chance to chat with a few reporters about the Supreme Court's upcoming argument in Panetti v. Quarterman, No. 06-6407, the capital case that was supposed to assess the standards for deciding if an inmate is mentally competent to be executed. When cert was granted, I suggested here that, because the facts in Panetti seem somewhat quirky, perhaps the cert grant was designed to allow the Supreme Court to explore generally the issue of applying the death penalty to persons with mental illnesses.  When talking to reporters, though, I came to appreciate again that, by definition, any litigation over whether a properly convicted murderer is mentally competent to be executed necessarily going to involve quirky facts.

And the story of Panetti took on an added dimension when the Supreme Court, sua sponte, called for briefing on the question of whether the defendant's habeas petition was "successive" within the meaning of 28 U.S.C. § 2244.   Those briefs have now been filed, and the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation has helpfully assembled all the Panetti briefs here.  A quick scan of all the briefs confirms my sense that there are lots of different strands lumped together in Panetti,  (This point is also born out by the issues covered on this webpage discussing Panetti and this ACS briefing and blog post about the case.)  It will be interesting to see if next week's oral argument will show which of the various possible strands that the Justices are most eager to chew on.

UPDATE:  This ABA Journal article provides effective coverage of Panetti, and the article nicely summarizes the dilemma facing the Justices:

Experts say the case could help clarify the criteria to be used for assessing whether a mentally ill death row inmate is competent for execution.  But observers on either side of the issue say it also raises the possibility that the court could go too far in one direction.

If the court holds that a defendant need only be aware that he or she is about to be executed and why the state says it wants the execution, even a profoundly mentally ill death row inmate might not be spared the ultimate punishment.  On the other hand, if the court holds that any defendant who could be classified as mentally ill should never be put to death, hardly anybody on death row would qualify for execution.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog now has this thoughtful discussion of the supplemental briefing issue and arguments in Panetti.