Texas Is About To Execute An Intellectually Disabled Man [View all]
Source: Think Progress
A Texas court on Tuesday denied a stay of execution to Robert Ladd, a convicted murderer who has an IQ of just 67, according to a test that was administered when he was a teenager. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that sentencing intellectually disabled inmates to death is cruel and unusual punishment, Ladd will be executed Thursday night unless the Supreme Court grants a last-minute appeal.
Ladd has been deemed “mentally retarded” several times throughout his life — first when he was 13 years old and then numerous times since. As an adult, he was employed with a non-profit organization that serviced individuals with intellectual disabilities. But in its ruling this week, Texas’ highest criminal court said that the Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t apply to Ladd because he “failed to satisfy his threshold burden on his claim of mental retardation.”
As the Supreme Court noted in both Atkins v. Virginia in 2002 and Hall v. Florida in 2014, “the medical community defines intellectual disability according to three criteria: significantly subaverage intellectual functioning, deficits in adaptive functioning… and onset of these deficits during the developmental period.” Although Ladd was labeled “fairly obviously retarded” by the Texas Youth Commission at age 13 and later qualified for services at the Andrews Center in Tyler, Texas, which assists the intellectually disabled as well as the mentally ill, Texas’ judicial system found that he does not currently meet the state’s unique definition of intellectually disabled.
Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/01/29/3616830/robert-ladd-execution/
WTF is wrong with you Texas?!?
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