Justices side with disabled death row killer
The U.S. Supreme Court again sided with death row prisoner Bobby James Moore, overturning for a second time a Texas appeals court decision in the landmark case over intellectual disability and capital punishment.
Slapping down the lower court’s most recent ruling as too similar to an earlier ruling the high court already rejected, the justices on Tuesday in a 6-3 decision deemed the former carpenter too intellectually disabled to execute.
“We conclude that the appeals court’s opinion, 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,” the justices wrote. “We consequently 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.”
Cliff Sloan, the attorney representing Moore, lauded the decision.
“We greatly appreciate today’s important ruling from the Supreme Court,” he said in a statement, “and we are very pleased that justice will be done for Bobby Moore.”
In a similar vein, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg praised the ruling as agreeing with her “stand for justice.”
Constitutional dispute
The latest opinion is something of a reprise in the twisting legal battle.
When Moore’s case ended up in front of the Supreme Court before, the justices decided that Texas was using non-scientific methods to determine intellectual disability — and Moore’s attorneys argued that he was so disabled that it would be unconstitutional to execute him.
Defense and prosecutors agreed to a life sentence, but when the case ended up before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the judges there refused to overturn Moore’s death sentence and grant him life behind bars. So defense lawyers again appealed up to the Supreme Court.
The legal case dates back to April 1980, when Moore was one of three men involved in a botched robbery of the Birdsall Super Market near Memorial Park. The trio targeted the store because two of the employees were elderly and the cashier was pregnant.
Moore, who fired the shot that killed elderly store clerk James McCarble, fled to Louisiana. But one of his co-conspirators turned himself in and confessed, leading to Moore’s arrest 10 days later. He was sentenced to death in a 1980 trial.
His sentence has proved a vexing one for the courts. The former carpenter failed every grade in school, did not understand the days of the week by age 13, and ate from neighbors’ garbage cans. Even as an adult, he fell below the standard for being able to live independently, according to court records.
Although it’s not constitutional to execute intellectually disabled prisoners, for years Texas relied on an out-dated, nonclinical test to evaluate mental capacity. Named after plaintiff Jose Briseno, the test used seven questions to determine intellectual disability, as outlined in a 2004 ruling that famously referenced “Of Mice and Men” character Lennie as someone most Texans would agree should be exempt from the death penalty.
A Harris County court in 2014 determined that Moore could not be executed. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals begged to differ, and so the case went up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices in 2017 sided with Moore in a groundbreaking 5-3 ruling.
The sweeping decision ordered Texas to completely redo its standards for determining intellectual disability, and it sent Moore’s case back to a lower court for review.
With the legal wrangling back in Harris County, prosecutors late that year agreed with the defense and said that a life sentence would be appropriate.
“I’m doing what I believe the law requires,” Ogg said in a statement at the time. “The nation’s highest court has ruled that intellectually disabled persons can’t be subject to the death penalty.”
But, again, the Texas appeals court disagreed. Although the judges came up with a new standard for intellectual disability, they said that Moore didn’t meet it because he didn’t demonstrate “adaptive deficits.”
So last fall, Moore’s attorneys once again took their case up to the Supreme Court.
Texas ‘found wanting’
Prosecutors filed a brief agreeing with the defense, and the American Bar Association, the American Psychological Association and a group of former deputy attorneys general filed briefs supporting the condemned man.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office sought to intervene and represent the state in continuing to seek a death sentence.
This week, the high court turned down the attorney general’s request, reversed the Texas appeals court’s decision and sent the case back to a lower court.
“The appeals court’s determination is inconsistent with our opinion in Moore,” the justices wrote.
“We have found in its opinion too many instances in which, with small variations, it repeats the analysis we previously found wanting, and these same parts are critical to its ultimate conclusion.”
The high court also wrote that the Texas appeals court had relied too much on adaptive strengths and not looked enough at Moore’s deficits, such as the fact that he sometimes didn’t even respond to his own name.
Chief Justice John Roberts — who did not side with Moore last time around — penned a concurring opinion and wrote that it was “easy to see” the lower court had erred.
Still, three justices — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — dissented from the majority opinion.