The Supreme Court agreed to hear two Texas death penalty cases in the next term that raise questions about intellectual disability and delays in execution. “It’s far more likely that the justices see the Moore case as an opportunity to look more carefully at the constitutionality of long-term solitary confinement, especially on death row, an issue Justice Kennedy raised concerns about”.
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Moore’s case presents a question about how people can prove that they are intellectually disabled, which the justices have repeatedly said renders a person ineligible for the death penalty. The expert testified that Buck was more likely to be risky because he is black. At issue is trial testimony in which which a psychologist claimed that Buck was more likely a threat to society because he was black, an assertion that Buck’s attorneys say underscores a racial bias in his sentencing that should overturn his death sentence.
Stay on topic – This helps keep the thread focused on the discussion at hand.
The court granted cert in the case of Bobby James Moore, who was first sentenced to death in 1980 for the murder of a Houston grocery store employee during an armed robbery.
In addition, Moore’s lawyers argue that execution after spending more than 35 years on death row is cruel and unusual punishment. In the petition asking the Supreme Court to review the case, Buck’s new lawyers wrote the lawyer in his trial was ineffective and that his death sentence was influenced by racial bias.
Since then, the court has refused to take on a case testing whether capital punishment remains constitutional.
Buck’s lawyer knew that Quijano considered “that race was among the ‘statistical factors in deciding whether a person will or will not constitute a continued danger, ‘ ” said Buck’s brief to the Supreme Court, filed by the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and the Texas Defender Service.
Buck’s case was among six in 2000 that then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, now a Republican U.S. senator, said needed to be reopened because of racially charged statements made during the trial sentencing phase. “My family deserves justice and he’s been sentenced to die”. Moore says that Supreme Court decisions in 2002 and 2014 bar executing intellectually disabled inmates and require the use of current clinical standards.
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“Prolonged confinement for many decades under sentence of death represents a sword of Damocles perpetually hanging just above the condemned individual’s head”, Moore’s lead attorney, Clifford Sloan, argued in court papers, according to USA Today. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sided with the state last September, and Moore appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. That occurred in February 2001 with a Harris County jury returning him to death row.
