Lee Kovarsky, the attorney for Marvin Wilson has issued the following statement in response to the denial of a stay of execution by the U.S. Supreme Court:
"We are gravely disappointed and profoundly saddened that the United States Supreme Court has refused to intervene to prevent tonight's scheduled execution of Marvin Wilson, who has an I.Q. of 61, placing him below the first percentile of human intelligence. Ten years ago, this Court categorically barred states from executing people with mental retardation. Yet, tonight Texas will end the life of a man who was diagnosed with mental retardation by a court-appointed, board certified specialist.
It is outrageous that the state of Texas continues to utilize unscientific guidelines, called the Briseño factors, to determine which citizens with intellectual disability are exempt from execution. The Briseño factors are not scientific tools, they are the decayed remainder of an uninformed stereotype that has been widely discredited by the nation's leading groups on intellectual disability, including the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. That neither the courts nor state officials have stopped this execution is not only a shocking failure of a once-promising constitutional commitment, it is also a reminder that, as a society, we haven't come quite that far in understanding how so many of those around us live with intellectual disabilities."
- Lee Kovarsky, Attorney for Marvin Wilson
August 7, 2012
"Texas executes man despite his claims of low IQ," is the AP report by Michael Graczyk.
A Texas man convicted of killing a police informant two decades ago was executed Tuesday evening after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected arguments that he was too mentally impaired to qualify for the death penalty.
Marvin Wilson, 54, was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m., 14 minutes after his lethal injection began at the state prison in Huntsville. Wilson's attorneys had argued that he should have been ineligible for capital punishment because of his low IQ.
Marvin Wilson's execution was the state's seventh execution of 2012; Texas' 484th post-Furman execution since 1982. Texas has the nation's most active death chamber and accounts for more than 37% of the executions in America's death penalty states.
To date, there have been 25 executions in the nation this year; a total of 1,302 post-Furman executions since 1977. According to TDCJ, seven additional executions have been scheduled for 2012 by state district courts.
Earlier coverage of Marvin Wilson's case begins at the link.
Comments