"The
Supreme Court
on Monday agreed to hear two appeals raising questions about the roles
race and intellectual disability might play in capital prosecutions. One
case, Buck v. Stephens, No. 15-8049, arose from a psychologist’s
testimony that black defendants were more dangerous than white ones. The case concerns
Duane Buck,
who was convicted of the 1995 murders of a former girlfriend and one of
her friends while her young children watched. Texas law allows death
sentences only if prosecutors can show the defendant poses a future
danger to society. During the trial’s sentencing
phase, Mr. Buck’s lawyer presented testimony from the psychologist,
Walter Quijano, who said that race was one of the factors associated
with future dangerousness. “It’s a sad commentary that minorities,
Hispanics and black people, are overrepresented in the criminal justice
system,” Dr. Quijano testified. A prosecutor
followed up. “The race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness
for various complicated reasons — is that correct?” Dr. Quijano answered, “Yes.” One of Mr. Buck’s trial lawyers, Jerry Guerinot, has
a dismal record in death penalty cases,
having represented 20 people sentenced to death in Texas, more than are
awaiting execution in about half of the states that have the death
penalty. In their
petition seeking Supreme Court review,
Mr. Buck’s new lawyers said that his trial lawyers had been ineffective
and that Mr. Buck’s death sentence was infected by racial bias. “Left
uncorrected, trial counsel’s injection of explicit racial
discrimination into Mr. Buck’s capital sentencing profoundly undermines
confidence in the integrity of both Mr. Buck’s death sentence and the
criminal justice system over all,” Mr. Buck’s lawyers told the justices The cases will be argued during the court’s next term, which starts in October.........The
justices also agreed on Monday to hear an appeal from Bobby J. Moore,
who has been on death row since 1980 for fatally shooting a 72-year-old
Houston supermarket clerk, James McCarble, during a robbery. That case,
Moore v. Texas, No. 15-797, raises questions about whether Texas uses
outdated standards in assessing whether a defendant’s intellectual
disability was severe enough to bar his execution. When the court ruled in 2002 in
Atkins v. Virginia
that the Constitution forbade the execution of people with mental
disabilities, it gave states only general guidance. It said a finding of
intellectual disability required proof of three things: “subaverage
intellectual functioning,” meaning low I.Q. scores; a lack of
fundamental social and practical skills; and the presence of both
conditions before age 18. The court said I.Q. scores under
“approximately 70” typically indicated disability. In 2014, in
Hall v. Florida, though, the court
ruled that Florida’s I.Q. score cutoff was too rigid to decide which mentally disabled individuals must be spared the death penalty. “Florida
seeks to execute a man because he scored a 71 instead of 70 on an I.Q.
test,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 5-to-4
decision. In Mr. Moore’s case, a trial court found
that he was intellectually disabled and constitutionally ineligible for
the death penalty.
An appeals court reversed that decision, saying the lower court had erred by “employing the definition of intellectual disability presently used.” The
appeals court ruled that a 23-year-old standard applied instead and
that, under it, Mr. Moore was not intellectually disabled." (Thanks to The Marshall Project for drawing this story to our attention. HL)
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