Smart enough to execute?FANS of “Of Mice and Men”, the 1937 novella by John Steinbeck, will recall the character of Lennie Small, an oafish, dim-witted man whose physical strength is ill-matched to his love of rabbits. On November 29th, in a remarkable example of law imitating art, a hearing at the Supreme Court put Lennie back in the spotlight. The question is whether the fictional man’s intellectual profile should help determine the fate of Bobby Moore, a real-life Texan awaiting execution.
Mr Moore, a man with an IQ in the 70s, was sentenced to die 36 years ago for killing a store clerk during a robbery. In 2014 Mr Moore had his death sentence revoked after successfully making a claim under Atkins v Virginia, a ruling of 2002 banning the execution of intellectually disabled people. But a year later the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) sent him back to death row. The quarrel in Moore v Texas is whether the CCA used the right standard when it decided that Mr Moore—who at 13 could name neither the days of the week nor the months of the year, nor distinguish between...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2gD937A
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