Supreme Court Overturns Texas’ ​“Outlier” Standard for Determining Intellectual Disability in Capital Cases

The U.S. Supreme Court has unan­i­mous­ly struck down Texas’ stan­dard for eval­u­at­ing intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty in death penal­ty cas­es, call­ing the state’s approach an ​“out­lier” that, “[b]y design and in oper­a­tion, … create[s] an unac­cept­able risk that per­sons with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty will be executed.” 

In Moore v. Texas, the Court on March 28 vacat­ed the judg­ment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), which had applied an unsci­en­tif­ic set of lay stereo­types known as the ​“Briseño fac­tors” (named after the Texas court deci­sion that announced them) to over­turn a tri­al court deter­mi­na­tion that Texas death-row pris­on­er Bobby Moore was intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled. The Court described these sev­en fac­tors — includ­ing such things as whether lay peo­ple who knew the defen­dant thought he was intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled and whether he could hide facts or lie effec­tive­ly — as an unsci­en­tif­ic ​“inven­tion” of the CCA that was ​“untied to any acknowl­edged source” and that lacked sup­port from ​“any author­i­ty, med­ical or judicial.” 

The Supreme Court ruled in 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, that the exe­cu­tion of indi­vid­u­als with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, but it left states with some dis­cre­tion in deter­min­ing who was intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled. However, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writ­ing for the five-jus­tice major­i­ty, reit­er­at­ed, ​“States’ dis­cre­tion … is not unfet­tered.” “[A] court’s intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty deter­mi­na­tion,” she wrote must be ​“informed by the med­ical community’s diagnostic framework.” 

The Moore deci­sion is the sec­ond time in recent years that the Court has addressed state devi­a­tions from clin­i­cal def­i­n­i­tions of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, which focus on ​“three core ele­ments: (1) intel­lec­tu­al-func­tion­ing deficits, (2) adap­tive deficits, and (3) the onset of these deficits while still a minor.” The Court struck down Florida’s use of a strict IQ cut­off in the 2014 case Hall v. Florida, not­ing that Florida’s stan­dard, ​“dis­re­gards estab­lished med­ical prac­tice.” The Hall deci­sion addressed the first ele­ment, intel­lec­tu­al-func­tion­ing, while Moore addressed aspects of both the first and sec­ond, adap­tive deficits. Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dis­sent­ed from the por­tion of the Court’s opin­ion that held that Texas had inap­pro­pri­ate­ly reject­ed Moore’s evi­dence of the first prong, deficits in intel­lec­tu­al func­tion­ing. But they joined the Court in reject­ing Texas’ use of the Briseño fac­tors, call­ing it ​“an unac­cept­able method of enforc­ing the guar­an­tee of Atkins.”

The Court said that, “[i]n con­clud­ing that Moore did not suf­fer sig­nif­i­cant adap­tive deficits, the CCA overem­pha­sized Moore’s per­ceived adap­tive strengths,” but ​“the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty focus­es the adap­tive-func­tion­ing inquiry on adap­tive deficits.” The Court ruled that Texas also had improp­er­ly required Moore to show that his deficits in func­tion­ing were unre­lat­ed to his trau­mat­ic upbring­ing and per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der. Traumatic expo­sures, the Court wrote, ​“count in the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty as ​‘risk fac­tors’ for intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty.” Further, the Court said, per­sons with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty may have oth­er co-exist­ing men­tal impair­ments and the exis­tence of oth­er men­tal-health issues are ​“not evi­dence that a per­son does not also have intellectual disability.”

Read the rul­ing here.