Intellectual Disability Still a Bar to Death Penalty, Says Court

The U.S. Supreme Court on March 28 reaffirmed that intellectual disability was a constitutional barrier to the death penalty.

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The ruling in the case of Moore vs. Texas upheld two previous decisions (Psychiatric News, June 20, 2014) and said that current mental health standards had to be applied in such cases.

“The Court, consistent with APA’s position, sent the case of Bobby Moore back to a lower court after finding that Texas failed to apply contemporary medical standards for making the diagnosis of intellectual disability,” Marvin Swartz, M.D., told Psychiatric News. Swartz is chair of APA’s Committee on Judicial Action and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine.

APA signed onto an amicus brief last year in support of Moore together with the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, American Psychological Association, National Association of Social Workers, and National Association of Social Workers Texas Chapter.

Moore killed a store clerk in Houston during a robbery in 1980 and was convicted and sentenced to death. He later challenged the sentence on grounds of intellectual disability. A lower court agreed, based on Supreme Court decisions in the Atkins v. Virginia (2002) and Hall v. Florida (2014) cases.

In Atkins, the court said that the Eighth Amendment “restrict[s] … the State’s power to take the life of any intellectually disabled individual.” In Hall, it held that a state “cannot refuse to entertain other evidence of intellectual disability when a defendant has an IQ score above 70.”

Moore scored an average of 70.66 on six IQ tests, marginally above a cutoff of 70, which is adjusted by a five-point standard error of measurement. He also had adaptive deficits in conceptual, social, and practical skillsets, any one of which would have confirmed intellectual disability, said the opinion.

“In [Hall], the Court clarified that the definition should comport with contemporary medical standards, avoid a rigid IQ cutoff score, and take into account the overall functioning of the individual,” said Swartz.

However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) rejected those precedents and said that the death sentence should be carried out, based on guidelines it had adopted in another case. That case, known as Ex parte Briseno, used standards based on the ninth edition (1992) of a manual by the American Association on Mental Retardation, not more recent revisions.

The current legal benchmarks for determining intellectual disability are the 11th edition of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities’ clinical manual (AAIDD–11) and the fifth edition of APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the 5-3 majority.

The present definition of disability includes “intellectual-functioning deficits, adaptive deficits, and the onset of these deficits while still a minor,” she noted, but the Texas CCA relied, “without citation to any medical or judicial authority,” on seven factors it claimed applied to determination of intellectual disability.

The Court pointed to a certain arbitrariness in the Texas CCA’s use of the Briseno standard. The state applies it only in death penalty cases, not in evaluating students, and it uses the “latest edition of the DSM” to assess juveniles in the criminal justice system.

The Court’s conservative wing disagreed with the majority.

“The Court … crafts a constitutional holding based solely on what it deems to be medical consensus about intellectual disability,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in his dissent, backed by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. “But clinicians, not judges, should determine clinical standards; and judges, not clinicians, should determine the content of the Eighth Amendment. Today’s opinion confuses those roles, and I respectfully dissent.”

The majority did not see that bright line between the two professions. Hall permitted some leeway in interpretation but only so much, said Ginsburg.

“Hall indicated that being informed by the medical community does not demand adherence to everything stated in the latest medical guide,” she said. “But neither does precedent license disregard of current medical standards.” ■