Overturning the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for the second time, the United States Supreme Court ruled on February 19, 2019, that Texas death-row prisoner Bobby James Moore is intellectually disabled and may not be executed. In an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court reversed the latest Texas appeals court decision that would have allowed Moore’s execution, saying the state court had relied on many of the same improper lay stereotypes and committed many of the same errors that had led the Justices two years ago to strike down Texas’s “outlier” approach to determining intellectual disability. The Court said that the Texas ruling, “when taken as a whole and when read in the light both of our prior opinion and the trial court record, rests upon analysis too much of which too closely resembles what we previously found improper.”
This decision marked the second time the Supreme Court had reversed a Court of Criminal Appeals denial of Moore’s intellectual disability claim. In 2014, a Texas trial court, applying prevailing clinical standards, found that Moore was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty under the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia. However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) overturned that decision, saying Moore had not satisfied a Texas-specific standard called the “Briseño factors” (named after the Texas court decision that announced them). In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected the use of these factors, calling them an unscientific “invention” of the TCCA that was “untied to any acknowledged source” and lacked support from “any authority, medical or judicial.” The Court criticized the TCCA’s reliance upon “lay stereotypes” about what people with intellectual disability can and cannot do and its misplaced focus on things Moore was able to do in a structured prison setting instead of considering his life history of impairments in daily adaptive functioning, and directed the TCCA to reconsider the issue applying appropriate diagnostic standards.
When the case returned to the state courts, numerous groups, including the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, filed friend-of-the-court briefs asserting that Moore met the prevailing medical definitions of intellectual disability. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office agreed with Moore and conceded that his death sentence should be vacated. Nonetheless, over the sharp dissent of three judges, the TCCA again upheld Moore’s death sentence. With the backing of the mental health professional associations, Special Olympics Chairman Tim Shriver, and a group of prominent conservative leaders who described the TCCA’s flouting of the 2017 Supreme Court ruling as “inimical to the rule of law,” Moore again asked the Supreme Court to intervene. When Harris County prosecutors again agreed that Moore was entitled to relief, the Texas Attorney General’s office attempted to intervene in the case to defend the TCCA’s ruling. The Supreme Court reversed, writing: “We … agree with Moore and the prosecutor that, on the basis of the trial court record, Moore has shown he is a person with intellectual disability.” Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, dissented, accusing the majority of improperly engaging in factfinding and failing to provide clarity to lower courts.
Cliff Sloan, a lawyer representing Moore, praised the ruling: “We greatly appreciate today’s important ruling from the Supreme Court, and we are very pleased that justice will be done for Bobby Moore.” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg also released a statement: “The Harris County District Attorney’s Office disagreed with our state’s highest court and the attorney general to stand for Justice in this case. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed.”
(D. Cassens Weiss, “For a second time, Supreme Court rules for Texas death-row inmate claiming intellectual disability” ABA Journal, February 19, 2019; K. Blakinger, “Supreme Court sides with intellectually disabled Harris County death row inmate for second time”, Houston Chronicle, February 19, 2019; J. McCullough, “For the second time, U.S. Supreme Court reverses death sentence decision for Texas inmate Bobby Moore”, Texas Tribune, February 19, 2019; Lawrence Hurley, U.S. Supreme Court bars Texas from executing death row inmate, Reuters, February 19, 2019.) Read the Supreme Court’s opinion in Moore v. Texas, No. 18 – 443 (U.S. Feb. 19, 2019). See U.S. Supreme Court and Intellectual Disability.
