The case posed the issue of how insane a person must be before a death sentence becomes unconstitutional, and the ruling came at the end of the Supreme Court's term.

At trial, Mr. Panetti, now 49, insisted on representing himself. He wore a purple cowboy costume, tried to subpoena Jesus, the pope and John F. Kennedy, and testified in the persona of his alter ego "Sarge." He'd been hospitalized 14 times for mental illness in the decade before the murders, at his in-laws' Fredericksburg home.

Lawyers handling his appeal argued few, if any, death row inmates are as mentally incompetent and that putting him to death would amount to "mindless vengeance" with no retributive purpose.

Four lower courts did find him competent to stand trial, and a jury rejected his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a 5-4 majority, found that Mr. Panetti's mental illness is so severe that it should have been considered.

"Someone who is condemned to death for an atrocious murder may be so callous as to be unrepentant; so self-centered and devoid of Compassion as to lack all sense of guilt; so adept in transferring blame to others as to be considered, at least in the colloquial sense, to be out of touch with reality," Justice Kennedy wrote, but Mr. Panetti's problem isn't merely "a misanthropic personality or an amoral character. It is a psychotic disorder."

At oral arguments in April, justices wrestled with the puzzling situation of an inmate who knows he's been convicted, knows what he's convicted for, knows the state plans to punish him – but suffers from a delusion that makes him ascribe satanic motives to the authorities.

Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, arguing for the prosecution, urged justices to focus on the central fact – essential to a legal finding of mental competence -- that Mr. Panetti understands that he is guilty of murder and that he faces execution for that murder.

The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the National Alliance on Mental Illness had all urged the Supreme Court to spare Mr. Panetti, arguing that regardless of current legal definitions, if a person has a mental disorder that "significantly impairs his or her capacity to understand the nature and purpose of the punishment," that person isn't competent to be executed.

Gregory Wiercioch, an attorney with Texas Defender Service who argued Mr. Panetti's case, lauded the ruling.

"The Supreme Court recognized that executing Scott Panetti would be a mindless, meaningless, and miserable spectacle," he said. "The Supreme Court today reaffirms the wisdom of a legal principle nearly a thousand years old – that the execution of persons like Scott Panetti serves no purpose and offends our sense of decency and common humanity."

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the four dissenters, criticized the majority's refusal to defer to lower courts regarding Mr. Panetti's mental competence, especially in the absence of evidence that his condition has worsened since his conviction – a contention Mr. Panetti's lawyers dispute.

Justice Thomas accused the court's majority of offering a "half-baked holding" that doesn't clarify standards for findings of legal insanity – leaving, instead, muddled guidelines for lower courts to sort through.

He argued that the only workable standard would be the one offered 20 years ago by Justice Lewis Powell, in a concurring in another mental competency case that left the court even more badly divided. Justice Powell wrote that no one should be executed unless they perceive "the connection between his crime and his punishment" – the standard Mr. Cruz had urged on the court.

The Panetti case is one of a number of Texas death row cases the Supreme Court has scrutinized this term.

In April, a 5-4 court threw out sentences for three killers whose juries, in choosing between execution and life in prison, weren't explicitly allowed to weigh mitigating factors such as childhood abuse.

The court's finding that meant a reprieve for three Texans, including LaRoyce Smith, who killed the night manager at a Dallas Taco Bell where he'd worked. He was a 19-year-old ninth-grader with an IQ of 78.

At the time of trial, Texas law gave juries a two-part test: if the conduct was deliberate, and the defendant posed an ongoing threat to society, the sentence would be death. Those rules were in use during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Legislature added a third test in 1991, asking juries to explicitly consider mitigating factors.

The Supreme Court threw out the Smith sentence on a 7-2 vote in 2004, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals defied the justices, asserting as it had previously that the lack of a the third jury instruction was harmless. The Supreme Court rejected that snub in April. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, caustically asserting that the Texas court suffered "confusion" and an inability to follow directions.

At the same time it threw out the Smith death penalty, the Supreme Court gave reprieves to two other Texas inmates whose appeals on the grounds had come up through the federal courts: Brent Ray Brewer, who stabbed a 66-year-old man and robbed him of $140, and Jalil Abdul-Kabir, who robbed a 66-year-old man who was walking his dog in San Angelo in 1988, strangled him with the leash and got $20.

Fifty Texas inmates were sent to death row under the flawed jury instructions, and within a week of the Smith ruling, the Supreme Court gave a near last-minute reprieve to another of them, Ronald Chambers, a Dallas man who has spent 31 years awaiting execution for a 1975 abduction-murder of a college student. He'd been convicted and sentenced to death three times.

The cases led many legal experts to view a growing sense of dissatisfaction on the Supreme Court over the way Texas has handled the death row process.

Though Jobe is not identified in the court records in the Ketner case, she said she was falsely described in the document and has been identified by name by several El Paso-area media outlets.

She has alleged defamation and civil conspiracy, charging that Ketner worked with federal prosecutors and investigators to concoct false allegations against her and others. Jobe demanded a jury trial and has not specified how much money she is seeking.

Jobe's lawyer, Leon Schydlower, was in court Tuesday and could not immediately be reached for comment.

Ketner's San Antonio lawyer, Joel Perez, has said he did not anticipate representing Ketner in the civil suit. Telephone numbers listed for Ketner have been disconnected.

A divided Supreme Court yesterday stopped an atheist group's lawsuit against President Bush's faith-based initiative, ruling that the plaintiffs do not have standing in the case and thus enabling Bush to continue a program he created by executive order without congressional approval.

The decision was made on a day when the high court showed its increasingly conservative tilt, approving restrictions on student speech, loosening limits on corporate- and union-paid advertising close to Election Day, and siding with developers in an environmental suit.

All four cases were decided by 5 -to- 4 votes, with both of Bush's picks -- Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who replaced the late William Rehnquist, and Justice Samuel Alito, who was confirmed after Sandra Day O'Connor retired -- siding with the majority. Rehnquist was a solid conservative, while O'Connor was widely viewed as a centrist swing vote.

The decisions show that "President Bush got exactly what he hoped for, a court substantially further to the right," said Tom Goldstein, a Harvard Law School lecturer on Supreme Court litigation who has also argued cases before the high court. If O'Connor were still on the court, he said, all four cases might have been decided differently.

The faith-based case is particularly important, Goldstein said, because it protects Bush's programs from legal challenges and indicates that the court will be "less concerned about keeping church and state separate, so later decisions will be more sympathetic to government's cooperating with religious institutions."

The plaintiffs in the case, including taxpayers from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, had argued that the funding of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, violated the established separation of church and state, putting the government in the position of steering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to groups with strong religious affiliations. The plaintiffs argued that Bush was spending taxpayer funds to hold conferences at which religious groups were urged to apply for federal grants.

But the Supreme Court, while not ruling directly on the First Amendment church-state issue, found that the taxpayers who sued the government can not do so simply because they pay taxes.

Writing for the majority, Alito said the federal budget is so big "it is a complete fiction to argue that an unconstitutional federal expenditure causes an individual federal taxpayer any measurable economic harm. And if every federal taxpayer could sue to challenge any government expenditure, the federal courts would cease to function as courts of law and would be cast in the role of general complaint bureaus."

Alito noted that the Supreme Court had previously made an exception under which taxpayers could sue if Congress appropriates funds in a way that violates the separation of church and state. But in this case, Alito wrote, the faith-based initiative funds were "paid for out of general Executive Branch appropriations" and therefore were not directly funded by Congress.

In a unanimous ruling, the court said that "hard-sell tactics directed at middle school students could lead to exploitation, distort competition between high school teams and foster an environment in which athletics are prized more highly than academics."

Games have rules, Justice John Paul Stevens said for the court. "It is only fair that Brentwood follow them," Stevens said.

Brentwood argued that the restriction violated its free-speech rights, even though it voluntarily joined the association.

The dispute arose from a letter that Brentwood's football coach sent to a dozen eighth-graders in 1997, inviting them to attend spring training at Brentwood. The students already had been accepted and signed enrollment contracts for the fall.

"This is effectively a national health crisis," said Eldo Bergman, director of the Texas Reading Institute, a Houston company that tutors hundreds of children who are not getting the help they need in public schools. "There's an awful lot of wasted human potential."

The Houston Independent School District is one of the most egregious offenders, with only 256 of its 200,000 students in dyslexia programs this year.

What's more, 70 percent of HISD's identified dyslexic students are concentrated in the district's more affluent west and central regions and 40 percent are white — about five times the percentage of white students districtwide. Although the disability doesn't discriminate, minority students are significantly underrepresented.

"Our numbers are low; we admit it," said Noelia Garza, assistant superintendent for special populations. "We have to make a more concerted effort to get the word out to parents. ... We may need to improve the way we communicate to teachers and administrators the process."

The district plans a $532,000 "dyslexia awareness campaign" in August with brochures, buttons, bookmarks, TV programs, a Web site and additional staff training.

Neighboring districts haven't performed much better. Less than 1 percent of students in the area are enrolled in a state-required dyslexia program, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of data for more than 1 million school children.

"That's terrible," said Geraldine Miller, chairwoman of the State Board of Education, who championed Texas' dyslexia law. "Of all places, Houston ought to be the role model."

"If rigorous rules like the one applied today are thought to be inequitable, Congress may authorize the courts" to adopt more lenient rules, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority.

In dissent, Justice David H. Souter wrote: "It is intolerable for the judicial system to treat people this way." He faulted the majority for "condoning this bait and switch."

It is the second time in a month that the court split along conservative-liberal lines over an issue of deadlines. In a 5-4 ruling that was seen as a setback for women's rights, the court overturned a pay-discrimination verdict in favor of the lone female supervisor at a Goodyear Tire plant because she had not pointed to unfair pay decisions within the time limit of 180 days prior to the filing of her suit.

In the case decided Thursday, Kevin Bowles was convicted of murder in 1999 for taking part in the beating of another man, and his appeals were rejected by the Ohio courts. His initial appeal was rejected by a federal district judge.

His lawyer sought to reopen his appeal, and under a federal rule of civil procedure he had 14 days to file a notice. The judge granted his motion to reopen the appeal on Feb. 10, 2004, but inexplicably said his notice must be filed by Feb. 27.

Bowles' notice was filed on Feb. 26, the day before the judge's deadline. But this was 16 days after he had granted the motion, or two days beyond the legal deadline.

State prosecutors insisted Bowles' appeal should be thrown out because of the missed deadline. And they argued that the appeals court had no legal authority to hear his case.

The appeals court agreed, and the high court upheld that decision Thursday in Bowles vs. Russell.

"Time limits for filing a notice of appeal are jurisdictional in nature," Thomas said, and therefore cannot be waived by judges for reasons for fairness. "We hold that [Bowles'] untimely notice — even though filed in reliance upon a District Court's order — deprived the Court of Appeals of jurisdiction." He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito.

Souter called the court's handling of the issue "puzzling" and "incoherent."

"Congress put no jurisdictional tag on the time limit here," he said, and the court was wrong to add one.

Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer joined the dissent.