Johnny Paul Penry’s Texas death sentence overturned by Supreme Court. Penry is the severely retarded confessed murderer whose first death sentence appeal in 1989 was upheld by the Supreme Court in a precedent-setting decision in which they found capital punishment of the retarded to be constitutional but ruled that juries must be properly instructed in how to weigh the defendant’s mental retardation as a mitigating factor in sentencing. The Court at that time sent the case back to Texas for a new trial, and Texas still didn’t manage to get it right; the current Court ruling upholds Penry’s lawyers’ contention that the instructions to the jury in the second trial were no better than the first. This may all be a moot point, because the Supreme Court has pending before it another case, from North Carolina, in which it has agreed to reconsider the more basic question it rejected in the 1989 Penry case — whether execution of the mentally retarded fundamentally violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Dallas Morning News