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.”