Justice Ginsburg tells Texas to stop ignoring science
Texas cannot disregard the medical community’s standards when it assesses which inmates are intellectually disabled — and therefore which inmates cannot be sentenced to death under the Constitution.
A 5–3 Supreme Court announced this decision in Moore v. Texas, in an opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative with relatively moderate views on the death penalty, crossed-over to vote with the Court’s four liberals.
Justice Ginsburg’s opinion is an affirmation that science trumps states’ rights, at least in a case like this where a state appeared to invent a method of diagnosing intellectual disabilities that has little grounding in medicine or psychology.
Fifteen years ago, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that “death is not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal.” The Atkins opinion, however, also contained a pretty substantial loophole — “we leave to the State[s] the task of developing appropriate ways to enforce the constitutional restriction upon its execution of sentences.”
https://thinkprogress.org/justice-ginsburg-tells-texas-to-stop-ignoring-science-7b96a01e684
= new reply since forum marked as read
From Justice Ginsberg, of course. 