Inmate With Low I.Q. Nears Execution in Texas
December 3rd, 2009 . by TexasFredInmate With Low I.Q. Nears Execution in Texas
HOUSTON — A 44-year-man whose lawyers claim he is mentally retarded is scheduled to be executed Thursday evening in Huntsville, Tex., unless the United States Supreme Court agrees to hear his case.
The man, Bobby Wayne Woods, whose I.Q. hovers around the level of a mildly retarded person’s, was convicted of the brutal killing of an 11-year-old girl in 1997 and sentenced to death.
The debate over whether he should be executed reflects the gray area left by the Supreme Court in 2002, when it ruled the mentally impaired were not eligible for the death penalty but left it up to state courts to interpret which inmates qualified as impaired.
Mr. Woods’s lawyers argue that his intelligence scores are low enough that he should be spared because of the Supreme Court ban in Atkins v. Virginia. But several courts have rejected that claim.
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Inmate With Low I.Q. Nears Execution in Texas
He was capable of committing the crime. He should be held accountable, and subsequently, he should be punished for his crime in an appropriate manner.
Maurie Levin, a University of Texas law professor who represents Mr. Woods, said in a pleading that “his I.Q. hovers around 70, the magical cutoff point for determining whether someone is mentally retarded.”
“He’s transparently childlike and simple,” she said. “It’s a travesty.”
DAMN the bleeding hearts! DAMN all of them. There truly IS a travesty here. That travesty took place with the MURDER of an innocent 11 year old girl. SHE was childlike, she may have been a simple child, I don’t know, but I do know this; everything she was, everything she may have become, every accomplishment and accolade she may have earned, was taken away from her when she was murdered.
WHO speaks out for HER? WHO speaks out for Sarah Patterson?
The bleeding heart anti death penalty people, and libbers in general, all scream about the execution of a MURDERER but have no problem with killing an innocent baby.
On April 30, 1997, Woods entered the home of his ex-girlfriend, Schwanna Patterson, through an open window. He then beat and sexually assaulted Patterson’s 11-year-old daughter, then abducted her and her nine-year-old brother and took them to a cemetery. There, Woods severely beat the boy about the head, resulting in serious injury and murdered the girl by cutting her throat. SOURCE
It took the original story several paragraphs before they even mentioned the name of the victim or her mother. Of course the NYT is a lot more concerned with the defense of the murderer than they are the person that was murdered. It is a rare occasion that I will even use the NYT as a source for a story, but this time they were the only source I could readily find.
But that standard has been applied unevenly by state courts, according to a study by Cornell law professors. Some state courts in Mississippi, Alabama and Texas have held that inmates with scores as low as 66 are not impaired, while an inmate in California with a score of 84 was declared mentally retarded.
