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Tag: intellectual disability
High Court Limits Death Penalty In Cases Of Intellectual Disability

High Court Limits Death Penalty In Cases Of Intellectual Disability

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court put a new and slightly expanded limit on the death penalty Tuesday, ruling that defendants whose IQ scores are near 70 should be spared because of their “intellectual disability.”

In a 5-4 decision, the court rejected the “rigid rule” set by Florida and several other states that deny leniency to a convicted murderer who scores at least 70 on an IQ test.

“Intellectual disability is a condition, not a number,” said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. “Courts must recognize, as does the medical community, that the IQ test is imprecise. … In using these scores to assess a defendant’s eligibility for the death penalty, a state must afford these test scores that same studied skepticism that those who design and use the tests do, and understand that an IQ test score represents a range rather than a fixed number.”

The high court abolished the death penalty in 2002 for those who are “mentally retarded,” but at the time, it did not set a precise rule for defining who qualified. Its opinion cited an IQ score of 70 as an understood cut-off point so that those who scored below would be spared.

Since then, several states, including Florida, Virginia, Alabama and Kentucky, have decided to disqualify any inmate who had at least one IQ score of 70 or above. Beyond those, Arizona, Delaware, Kansas, North Carolina and Washington have also referred to a 70 score as a “bright-line cutoff,” Kennedy said.

In Tuesday’s opinion, Kennedy and the court said state officials should not “view a single factor as dispositive” and should consider the inmate’s “adaptive functioning” in society.

The ruling set aside the death penalty handed down against Freddie Lee Hall for two murders in Florida in 1978. He had been described as “psychotic, mentally retarded and brain damaged” at the time of his conviction, but he scored 71 on a single IQ test.

Kennedy’s opinion was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

OZinOH via Flickr

Bachmann’s Silence Is Golden

Steven Miles and Arthur Caplan are my new heroes. They should be yours, too — if you hold the radical opinion that facts matter.

Dr. Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist, offered $1,000 to charity if Michele Bachmann can prove a link she suggested between vaccinations for human papillomavirus and intellectual disability. Dr. Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, upped the ante on Miles’ offer, adding $10,000 of his own.

Bachmann, the frequently facts-challenged Minnesota congresswoman who wants to be president, wandered into this thicket during a recent GOP debate in Tampa, Fla. She attacked Texas Gov. Rick Perry for an executive order requiring girls in that state to be vaccinated for HPV or, as Bachmann put it, to receive “a government injection.”

It was an obvious attempt to tap that rich seam of anti-government ferment that runs through the body politic. Later, in interviews with Fox “News” and the “Today” show, she spoke of a woman who came up to her crying after the debate.

“She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She said her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.”

And how difficult is it to imagine a scenario where that irresponsible remark pays off in tragedy? HPV causes cervical cancer. If some child now dies of that disease because her parents were made paranoid of “government injections,” much of the blame will lie with Bachmann.

When she found herself pilloried by doctors, pundits and even her own ideological soulmates, Bachmann responded that she wasn’t speaking as a doctor or scientist, but only as a mother. It’s a remarkably disingenuous excuse, reminiscent of Sen. Jon Kyl saying in April that an outlandish claim he made about Planned Parenthood “was not intended to be a factual statement.”

Still, it beat the usual strategy of doubling down on stupid, seeking some loophole through which the incorrect can be proven correct. You saw this when Bachmann was hammered on her ludicrous claim that the Founding Fathers worked “tirelessly” to end slavery.

As proof, she trotted out John Quincy Adams who did, indeed, work to abolish slavery. Too bad he was all of 8 years old when the nation began. He was a Founding Child, perhaps, but a Founding Father? No.

But the fact is, facts don’t matter much to Bachmann. She is the avatar of a slimy ethos newly prominent in American politics and life. It is the elevation of end over means, the binding of conscience and the gagging of integrity. It is permission to say whatever outrageous thing will give you advantage, to lie your natural backside off if it will win the argument.

Facts? True believers don’t need no stinking facts.

Or, as Stephen Colbert famously observed, it is no longer necessary that a thing be true. It is enough that it be “truthy.”

Except that it really isn’t enough. Facts don’t stop being facts just because you ignore them. So we are indebted to Miles and Caplan for putting their money where Bachmann’s mouth is, requiring her to put up or shut up. In failing to respond to their challenge, she has effectively chosen the latter.

And she says more by her silence than ever she did with words.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

(c) 2011 The Miami Herald Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.