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douglas9 (867 posts) Texas to execute mentally disabled prisoner on TuesdayA 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/
I suppose that I could Nadin this, but I refuse to. What crime did said death-row convict do to earn him a date with a needle?
Marvin Wilson was put on death row for the 1992 murder of a police drug informant in Beaumont, Texas. The circumstances of the crime had all elements that make death sentences for people with learning difficulties problematic: Wilson was one of two perpetrators, leaving him vulnerable to his more sophisticated accomplice, and the main witness against him was that accomplice’s wife who claimed she heard him confess to pulling the trigger.
