Texas court updates death penalty protocols

A Texas court implemented updated protocols for Death Row prisoners with intellectual disabilities. The revised standards came after the U.S. Supreme Court had set aside Texas prisoner Bobby Moore’s execution, Reuters reports.
The new protocols allowed the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to reinstate Moore’s death sentence.

Moore, 58, was convicted of murder in 1980. He was sentenced to execution, but the execution was set aside by the U.S. Supreme Court because of its 2002 ruling that the execution of inmates with intellectual disabilities is “cruel and unusual punishment.”

A 2017 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concerning the Moore case, ruled against Texas’ system for measuring the intellect of defendants, because it was found to be “deficient.”
This 2017 Supreme Court decision came a month after a psychologist had testified that another Texas inmate facing execution was more likely to reoffend because he was Black. Chief Justice John Roberts said that the comment was a “noxious strain of racial prejudice.”

However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, announced in June that it had revised its standards to better reflect modern medical thinking and abide by U.S. Supreme Court directives. “Under its new protocols, inmate Bobby Moore, 58, can be executed,” the Texas court said.
PPI’s “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State” is the first report to aggregate data on all types of correctional control nationwide.

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