# Moore v. Texas (2017)

Moore v. Texas, 137 S. Ct. 1039 (2017), is a United States Supreme Court decision about the death penalty and intellectual disability. The court held that contemporary clinical standards determine what an intellectual disability is, and held that even milder forms of intellectual disability may bar a person from being sentenced to death due to the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The case clarified two earlier cases, Atkins v. Virginia (2002) and Hall v. Florida (2014).

## Background
### Legal background

Texas has been influential in the development of capital punishment jurisprudence in the United States. Important landmark Supreme Court decisions like Penry v. Lynaugh (1993) have originated in Texas and the state has also come into conflict with the Supreme Court over the implementation of important decisions like Atkins v. Virginia.$^{:2–3}$ The Atkins decision overturned Penry by holding that executing the intellectually disabled is unconstitutional because no legitimate penological purpose is served by executing a person who is not able "to learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, or to control impulses".$^{:230}$
The Supreme Court left to the states the "task of developing appropriate ways to enforce the constitutional restriction upon [their] execution of sentences" in the Ford v. Wainwright (1986) decision prohibiting the execution of insane prisoners; it did the same in Atkins.$^{:29}$ Between 2003 and 2011 there were several failed proposals in the Texas Legislature to enact a statutory procedure for Atkins claims.$^{:32–35}$ Texas had the highest volume of Atkins collateral review claims of any death penalty state at that time.$^{:37}$ In 2004 the Texas state courts developed interim Atkins procedures in Ex parte Briseno.$^{:40–42}$
Without an agreed-upon statutory definition of "mental retardation" the Briseno Court attempted to "define that level and degree of mental retardation at which a consensus of Texas citizens would agree that a person should be exempted from the death penalty" by innovating seven additional evidentiary factors for assessing adaptive functioning deficits.$^{:781}$

### Case background

Bobby James Moore was sentenced to death in 1980 for killing James McCarble during an attempted robbery of a grocery store in Houston, Texas.
After Moore's conviction was upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 1985, he filed a habeas corpus petition claiming ineffective assistance of counsel in federal court. He was granted a new sentencing hearing in 2001, one year before Atkins was decided, and was again sentenced to death.$^{:781}$ Moore did not present any intellectual disability defense at the hearing. Intellectual disability was raised for the first time in a state habeas petition filed after the Supreme Court decided Atkins.$^{:782}$ The state habeas court ordered a two day evidentiary hearing in 2014 and, upon a finding of intellectual disability,recommended that Moore's death sentence be either vacated or turned into a life in prison sentence.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) instead affirmed Moore's death sentence after finding that his IQ was 78. Some of Moore's IQ test scores were under 75 but some were higher. The CCA only accepted the higher score.$^{:215}$ The CCA held that the court below was required to apply the Briseno factors when deiciding whether adaptive functioning deficits were related to intellectual disability. The habeas court, applying an up-to-date standard, did not make a relatedness determination. Following the state-implemented Atkins procedure, the state court found that Moore was not intellectually disabled .$^{:215}$
The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari.

## Decision

In a 5–3 decision authored by Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg the Supreme Court concluded that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had relied on "wholly nonclinical" stereotypes and "failed adequately to inform itself of the medical community's diagnostic framework". The Court reversed the CCA decision because its analysis was "pervasively infected" by the Briseno factors.$^{:1316}$
First, the Supreme Court considered the CCA finding that Moore did not meet the subaverage intellectual functioning requirement of mental retardation. Explaining that an IQ of 70 was not a rigid cutoff, the Court found that Moore did met the IQ score requirement for intellectual disability:$^{:216}$$^{:1329}$
   [In] line with Hall we require that courts continue the inquiry and consider other evidence of intellectual disability where an individual's IQ score, adjusted for the test's standard error, falls within the clinically established range for intellectual-functioning deficits.
For the adaptive functioning inquiry, the Court said the reliance on the Briseno factors "created an unacceptable risk of executing an intellectually disabled person" and that a "consensus of Texas citizens" could not exclude people with "mild" intellectual disability from the categorial exemption created by Atkins.$^{:1321}$ The "arbitrary offsetting of deficits against unconnected strengths in which the [Texas Court of Criminal Appeals] engaged" was inconsistent with "prevailing clinical standards".$^{:1315}$
Chief Justice John Roberts dissented, joined by Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.$^{:791}$ He stated that Texas had considered the "prevailing clinical standards" when it crafted its death penalty scheme, and that states had a right to determine their own schemata for defining intellectual disability.$^{:791}$ He also said the court's reliance on clinical standards, and not moral judgments, was at odds with Eighth Amendment jurisprudence.$^{:791}$

## Later developments

On remand in 2018, the CCA again sentenced Moore to death.$^{:5}$ Moore appealed to the Supreme Court, and they reversed the decision in a per curiam opinion in Moore v. Texas II, 139 S. Ct. 666 (2019).$^{:5}$ They held that Moore was ineligible for death because of his intellectual disability; Chief Justice Roberts concurred, while Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissented.$^{:5,30}$
As of 2021, there were 28 states that still used the death penalty, and 19 of them cited Moore I or II.$^{:31}$ Some courts followed Moore I and II clearly, while others did not.$^{:92}$