Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said he suspects the stay was prompted by confusion over whether Wilcher wanted to waive his appeals.

“Here this guy waived his appeals, his attorney said he wasn’t competent, I suspect they said, ‘Let’s slow this down just a minute,”’ Hood said.

Hood said Wilcher was lucid when he told the district judge that he wanted to drop his appeals.

“We expect the Supreme Court to find this guy is competent to have made that decision,” said Hood, who believes Wilcher’s execution could be rescheduled for as early as November.

Scheidegger said bipolar is a real disorder unlike some other mental illnesses.

“But whether it makes you incapable of exercising free will, I am very skeptical,” he said. “The broader idea that anything that has a code in the psychiatrist’s manual constitutes an exemption from capital punishment isn’t going to fly. Half the people in prison have a so-called anti-social personality disorder, which is why they are in prison.”

In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled it is unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded. The justices have not extended that ruling to the mentally ill. Few expect the court would use Wilcher’s case to address that issue.

“I don’t suspect the court is ready to take on that whole issue of the mentally ill and the death penalty similar to the same way they did mental retardation, but someday they might,” Dieter said.

Wilcher, now 43, was sentenced to death for the 1982 slayings of two Scott County women. After meeting them at a Forest bar, Wilcher persuaded the women to drive him home and diverted them down a deserted road.

Their blood-soaked bodies were found sprawled along the muddy banks of the dirt road. Each woman had been stabbed and slashed more than 20 times, according to authorities.

Wilcher’s case has gone through two trials, two re-sentencing hearings and countless appeals.

The Supreme Court has space left on its fall calendar for appeals. Justices have agreed to hear only one death penalty case so far.

The Supreme Court said it would consider this fall whether a California man’s death sentence should be reinstated. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had thrown out Fernando Belmontes’ sentence for killing a 21-year-old woman, Steacy McConnell, with a metal dumbbell bar in 1981.

At issue in the appeal is whether jurors were properly told to consider mitigating evidence that justified sparing his life. California lawyers argued that the appeals court decision could jeopardize other old death-row cases in that state.

If the justices decide to hear the Wilcher case, it could be nine months to a year before a decision is made.