The US Supreme Court overturned Tuesday a death sentence for a Texas man, saying he was not properly sentenced because of his mental disability.
The five-to-three Supreme Court decision offered a reprieve to Bobby Moore, a 57-year-old prisoner who fatally shot a clerk at a Houston grocery store during a botched holdup in 1980. His case now goes back to lower courts in Texas.
The Supreme Court said that Texas had violated the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment by using an outdated standard for mental disability.
The ruling dealt a blow to Texas, the southwestern state that leads the nation in the number of executions it carries out.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in reading the decision, said that Texas cannot use outdated standards for mental disability in sentencing a prisoner to death.
“Texas cannot satisfactorily explain why it applies current medical standards for diagnosing intellectual disability in other contexts, yet clings to superseded standards when an individual’s life is at stake,” she said.
John Blume, director of the Cornell Law School Death Penalty Project, welcomed the decision.
“The Court made clear that states are not free to adopt standards that deviate from the medical community’s diagnostic framework,” he said.
The three most conservative members of the high court — John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — dissented.
According to his lawyers, Moore at age 13 was unable to tell time, discern the days of the week or discern addition from subtraction.
Texas insisted that he warranted the death penalty, basing its evaluation of his mental capacity on a 1992 medical manual and controversial criteria.
The Texan judges disputed that he had intellectual disabilities, noting he could play pool and mow the lawn.
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