ON JUNE 6th, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases involving recurring concerns about the administration of the death penalty in America. Moore v Texas revisits the question of intellectual disability to ask whether Texas used an outdated method of measuring a man’s mental capacity before condemning him. The other case, Buck v Stephens, is also out of Texas. It looks into a psychologist’s racist testimony in sentencing Duane Buck to death in 1997. It’s no accident that the Lone Star state figures in both appeals: Texas dwarfs its nearest rival, Oklahoma, in total executions (537 to 112) and carried out nearly half of America’s 28 death sentences in 2015.
The courtroom proceedings in Buck were bizarre. The first brow-furrowing aspect of the case is the blatantly racist message Walter Quijano, a psychologist, delivered while on the stand. When pressed to list “statistical factors or environmental factors” that increase the...Continue reading
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