The Eighth Amendment forbids executing the insane because doing so offends human decency in that it serves neither the goal of retribution or deterrence. "The potential for a prisoner's recognition of the severity of the offense and the objective of community vindication are called into question, however, if the prisoner's mental state is so distorted by a mental illness that his awareness of the crime and punishment has little or no relation to the understanding of those concepts shared by the community as a whole." This is what the Court in "Ford" was referring to when it held that an inmate who lacks a rational understanding of the reason for his execution. A death-row inmate who is "so callous as to be unrepentant, so self-centered and devoid of compassion as to lack all sense of guilt, so adept at transferring blame to others as to be considered, at least in the colloquial sense, to be out of touch with reality" may still have a "rational understanding" of the reason for his execution. Panetti's claim was that, by virtue of his mental illness, his psychotic disorder, he lacked such a "rational understanding". Both the Texas courts' procedural missteps and the Fifth Circuit's substantive definition of incompetence precluded consideration of this contention.