The U.S. Supreme Court is looking at a death penalty case involving a man who may be intellectually disabled. Texas decided that Bobby James Moore, 57, deserves the death penalty for killing a grocery store clerk in 1980.
The state doesn’t allow people with intellectual disabilities to be executed. Moore’s lawyers are saying that the state “ignored” medical standards and said that Moore is not disabled.
Moore’s lawyer, Clifford Sloan, wrote that the court’s:
“… Head-in-the-sand approach … ignores advances in the medical community’s understanding and assessment of intellectual disability over the past quarter century.”
Moore’s lawyers want his death penalty set aside saying it violates the Constitution and a previous Supreme Court ruling. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution bans “cruel and unusual” punishment, and a 2002 Supreme Court case involving North Carolina said that we can’t execute people with mental disabilities.
Texas uses a “three-pronged” test to determine if an inmate has an intellectual disability. First, their IQ score must be at or below 70. They look at how the person interacts with other people. Then, they look at whether or not these problems started when the inmate was under 18.
As NPR reported:
“Moore’s lawyers note that, at age 13, he didn’t understand the days of the week, the months of the year, how to tell time, or the principle that subtraction is the reverse of addition. He failed first grade twice, but school officials continued to advance him in order to keep him with children of a similar age. In addition to his other difficulties, his father beat him repeatedly over his failures in school. And when Moore was 14, his father threw him out of the house to live on the streets.”
It sounds like this guy is very much disabled. He shouldn’t be executed.
https://youtu.be/cUEv-fg0LqE
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