Texas to execute mentally disabled prisoner on Tuesday
A death row prisoner who has been medically diagnosed as “mentally retarded” and therefore exempt from execution is set to die on Tuesday in Texas, a state that rejects scientific consensus and instead applies its own definition of learning difficulties based on a character in a John Steinbeck novel.
Barring a last minute intervention by the courts, Marvin Wilson, 54, will be put to death by lethal injection even though he has been subjected to scientifically-recognised tests that show him to be intellectually disabled – or “mentally retarded” as the US legal system still calls the condition.
In 2002, the US supreme court banned executions for all such prisoners under the Eighth Amendment of the constitution that prohibits excessive punishment. The 2002 ban, in Atkins v Virginia, is categorical: individuals with mental retardation cannot be put to death. The court allowed some discretion on the part of individual states to devise procedures for administering the injunction, but no right to ignore it.
Texas took that discretion to mean – wrongly in the view of many lawyers and mental health experts – that it could set its own definition of retardation.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/05/texas-to-execute-mentally-disabled-prisoner-on-tuesday/
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Huffington Post 8/7/12
Marvin Wilson Set To Be Executed After U.S. Supreme Court Denies Request To Stay
HUNTSVILLE, Texas — The U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Tuesday evening execution of a Texas death row inmate whose lawyers say should be ineligible for the death penalty because of his low IQ.
Marvin Wilson, 54, was sentenced to death for killing a police informant two decades ago. The high court denied his request for a stay of execution less than two hours before his lethal injection was scheduled to begin.
In their appeal to the high court, defense attorneys pointed to a psychological test conducted in 2004 that pegged Wilson's IQ at 61, below the generally accepted minimum competency standard of 70. But lower courts agreed with state attorneys, who argued that Wilson's claim was based on a single test that may have been faulty and that his mental impairment claim isn't supported by other tests and assessments of him over the years.
Lead defense attorney Lee Kovarsky said he was "gravely disappointed and saddened" by Tuesday's ruling, calling it "outrageous that the state of Texas continues to utilize unscientific guidelines ... to determine which citizens with intellectual disability are exempt from execution."
