05/05/2026
Seventy years ago tomorrow, Johnny Paul Penry was born with brain damage. Throughout his childhood, his schizophrenic mother abused him and forced him to drink his own urine and eat his own f***s. He stopped going to school after the 1st grade. Not surprisingly, in adulthood, he went on to victimize innocent people in horrific ways.
Texas prosecutors spent 30 years and untold millions of dollars trying to kill him before allowing him to plead guilty in 2008 to life imprisonment.
Despite the suffering Johnny endured as a child, and, more importantly, the atrocities he inflicted on others, a silver lining emerged from his case: courts now must specifically instruct capital juries that they may consider a defendant’s intellectual limitations as a reason not to impose a sentence of death.
.alj
