"Supreme Court to look at how states weigh whether death row inmates are mentally disabled," is the AP report, via the Washington Post.
The Supreme Court will take up a Florida case over how judges should determine if a death row inmate is mentally disabled, and thus ineligible for execution.The justices said Monday they will review a Florida Supreme Court ruling that upheld the death sentence for a man who scored just above the state’s cutoff for mental disability as measured by IQ tests.
And:
Florida law prohibits anyone with an IQ of 70 or higher from being classified as mentally disabled, regardless of other evidence to the contrary. Hall’s scores on three IQ tests ranged from 71 to 80.
In 2002, the Supreme Court banned the execution of mentally disabled inmates. But the 6-3 decision in Atkins v. Virginia essentially left it to the states to determine how to measure mental disability.
Florida is one of nine death penalty states with a strict IQ limit, said Florida Supreme Court Justice Barbara Pariente. The others are: Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington.
SCOTUSblog posts, "Court grants two cases," by Lyle Denniston.
The new death penalty case from Florida raised this issue: “Whether the Florida scheme for identifying mentally retarded defendants in capital cases violates Atkins v. Virginia.” In that 2002 decision, the Supreme Court had ruled that it is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment to execute individuals who are found to be mentally retarded. The Court, however, left it to the states to decide who is mentally retarded and thus cannot be given the death penalty.
In the new case, attorneys for Freddie Lee Hall contended that Florida courts have adopted a “bright line” rule that a person is not mentally retarded unless their IQ is measured at 70 or below. The state Supreme Court found that Hall had an IQ of 71. In an earlier stage of Hall’s case, before the Supreme Court had decided the Atkins case, he had been found to be mentally retarded, the petition said.
Hall was sentenced to death for the February 1978 murder of a 21-year-old pregnant housewife, Karol Hurst, taken captive as she left a grocery store in Leesburg, Fla. Hall was prosecuted along with another man, Mack Ruffin, for taking the woman to a wooded area in another county, where she was sexually assaulted and shot to death. After that crime, he and Ruffin allegedly killed a deputy sheriff, Lonnie Coburn, after an incident at a convenience store in another county. Prosecutors contended that Mrs. Hall was captured and killed as part of a plot to get a car that would be used in a planned robbery. Hall has been in prison awaiting the death penalty since shortly after the crimes more than 35 years ago.
The SCOTUSblog case file for Hall v. Florida contains all briefing in the case, including the Cert Petition.
"Justices to rule on 'mental retardation' in death case,"is by Richard Wolf for USA Today.
At issue is whether Hall is mentally retarded — a legal term since changed to "intellectually disabled" in most states. The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing people with mental retardation is "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment.But what the court did not do in Atkins v. Virginia is set a national standard for what constitutes the disability — leaving states such as Florida to devise their own definitions.
And:
"Unfortunately, the human race has not yet developed a test for mental retardation that is like a blood pressure machine, hooked up to a defendant's arm with a gauge that reads R for retarded or N for not retarded," the brief states. "The state of Florida cannot invent out of whole cloth a bright line cutoff for determining mental retardation."
It is not clear whether the Supreme Court will limit its ruling to Florida or move toward a national standard for determining whether a person is mentally retarded.
"To the extent it deals with a challenge to a state's prerogative to define mental retardation a certain way, it would very likely have applicability to other states in terms of potentially setting limits on that prerogative," says Brian Kammer, a lawyer for a Georgia death row inmate whose mental retardation challenge recently was denied by the court.
ABA Journal posts, "When does mental disability prevent execution? SCOTUS to consider Florida IQ standard," by Debra Cassens Weiss.
The cert petition notes that a previous IQ test found Hall had an IQ of 60, but he became “unretarded” after a second test. “The state of Florida cannot by decree make a cow a chicken, nor can it make standardized IQ results more precise than the inventors of those tests say is reasonable,” the petition says.
“While this court granted the states leeway in crafting appropriate methods to enforce the constitutional restriction against execution of the mentally retarded, … it did not grant the authority for a state to create out of thin air a definition of mental retardation which undoubtedly will fail to identify mentally retarded capital defendants.”
The cert petition cites evidence that Hall suffers from organic brain damage and mental illness, and was abused by his mother and neighbors.
Earlier coverage from Florida begins at the link.
Related posts are in the mental retardation category index. As I often point out, mental retardation is now generally referred to as a developmental or intellectual disability.
Because it has a specific meaning with respect to capital cases, I continue to use the older term on the website. More on Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court's 2002 ruling banning the execution of those with mental retardation, is via Oyez.
Comments