Texas Legislators Ask Why Intellectually Disabled Bobby James Moore is Still on Death Row

In March 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had employed an unscientific and unconstitutionally harsh standard in rejecting Bobby James Moore’s claim that he is ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. Despite a subsequent concession by Harris County prosecutors in November 2017 that Moore (pictured) qualifies as intellectually disabled under all accepted medical definitions, the state court has still not ruled on Moore’s case, leaving him in 23-hour solitary confinement on the state’s death row. Now, two state legislators are asking why.

In a May 18 commentary in the Texas Tribune publication “TribTalk,” State Representatives Senfronia Thompson and Joe Moody write that it is “unconscionable” that “Bobby Moore remains marooned on death row, waiting for the [Court of Criminal Appeals] to act.” The court, they write, “should immediately change Bobby Moore’s death sentence to life in prison so that he may be moved off of death row, as law and justice require.”

Moore was convicted and sentenced to death for his involvement in the armed robbery of a Houston supermarket in 1980 in which a store employee was shot to death. In 2014, a Texas trial court determined that Moore qualified as intellectually disabled under the clinical standards accepted in the medical community and, based on the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia, was not subject to the death penalty. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned that ruling, saying that to be considered intellectually disabled in Texas, a death-row prisoner also must satisfy a stringent set of lay stereotypes known as the “Briseño factors” (named after the Texas court decision that announced them).

Calling those factors an unscientific “invention” by the Texas court that was “untied to any acknowledged source” and that lacked support from “any authority, medical or judicial,” the Supreme Court reversed and returned the case to the Texas courts for a resolution that was “informed by the medical community’s diagnostic framework.” Under that framework, prosecutors told the Texas court that Moore “is intellectually disabled, cannot be executed, and is entitled to Atkins relief.”

Representatives Thompson and Moody write that Moore’s current state of limbo is “unjust and unacceptable.” They say, “The time has come for the CCA to do justice in Bobby Moore’s case. More than a year since the Supreme Court’s decision in his favor, it is long past time for him to be moved off of death row and out of solitary confinement.” To the extent that the criminal appeals court “needs more time to fashion a new standard for evaluating intellectual disability claims” for all death-penalty cases in Texas, the legislators say “it should at least issue an interim order striking down Moore’s death penalty immediately[,] allowing him to be moved off of death row and out of solitary confinement. Such an order,” they say “would give effect to the Supreme Court’s decision, remove the specter of an unconstitutional death sentence and allow Moore to return to the general prison population.”