SCOTUS: INTELLECTUALLY IMPAIRED CAN’T BE EXECUTED

In a 5-4 decision Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in a Florida case that an IQ test score of 70 as a minimum in determining who's eligible for the death penalty is unconstitutional

On February 21 1978, Freddie Lee Hall and an accomplice were looking to steal a car for use in a robbery. They approached Karol Hurst, 21, in the parking lot of a Leesburg, Florida grocery store and forced her into their car. Hall drove away in one of the cars while his accomplice and Hurst followed in the other car. Hurst, who was seven months pregnant, was taken to a wooded area where she was beaten, raped and shot to death. Later that same day, a convenience store clerk became suspicious of Hall and his accomplice. He called the Hernando County SO which was across the street. Hall and his pal were approached by Deputy Lonnie Coburn and during an ensuing confrontation the deputy was shot dead with his own gun.

Hall was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of Karol Hurst. Florida has a rigid interpretation that anyone with an IQ of 70 or below is intellectually impaired and cannot be executed. Hall had an IQ score of 71. It was that rigid rule which led the Supreme Court to overturn Hall’s death sentence. Hall’s attorneys argued that IQ tests have a standard risk of error. They cited that Hall had been diagnosed as mentally retarded on many occasions.

Justice Anthony Kennedy and the four liberal justices ruled that Florida’s rigid IQ interpretation is unconstitutional. Justice Samuel Alito and his three conservative colleagues disagreed.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports that:

Writing , Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that Florida's law means if a prisoner is found to have an IQ above 70, "all further exploration of intellectual disability" is cut off. He said the "rigid rule ... creates an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed, and thus is unconstitutional."

The justice wrote that "to impose the harshest of punishments on an intellectually disabled person violates his or her inherent dignity as a human being."

"The Florida statute, as interpreted by its courts, misuses IQ score on its own terms," Kennedy wrote, "and this, in turn, bars consideration of evidence that must be considered in determining whether a defendant in a capi¬tal case has intellectual disability. Florida's rule is invalid under the Constitution's Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause."

Justice Alito disagreed, writing in a 20-page dissent that the Supreme Court "fails to grasp that Florida's system already accounts for the risk of testing error by allowing the introduction of multiple test scores."

He added, "Any evaluation of intellectual disability, whether based on objective tests or subjective observations, is 'complicated.' If conducting the proper analysis of multiple scores produces an IQ as reliable as the approach mandated by the Court, there is no basis for rejecting Florida's approach."

Whatever happened to the rule that held if you know the difference between right and wrong you are eligible for the death penalty? As far as those IQ tests are concerned, I have never believed they were all that reliable. For one thing, they can be manipulated by the person being tested. And a person who is not interested in taking that test will always score low. IQ tests aside, even if Freddie Lee Hall was mentally retarded, he surely must have known that robbing, kidnapping, raping and murdering was wrong.

Intellectually impaired? I suppose it never occurred to the five justices that Freddie was smart enough to know that if he did not kill Karol Hurst, she would be able to identify him to the police.

This decision will also affect other states, including Texas.

Score one for the liberal bleeding hearts. Kennedy and the four liberal justices have fucked the family of Karol Hurst and her unborn child, the family of Deputy Lonnie Coburn, and the whole law enforcement community.