Source: https://www.scotusblog.com/2016/06/court-reopens-race-and-death-penalty-issues/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 06:20:54+00:00

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Returning to ongoing disputes over the role of race in criminal punishment and in politics, the Supreme Court on Monday added new cases for decisions at its next Term — one involving the death penalty in Texas, the other involving the drawing of new maps for election of members of Virginia’s state legislature.
The other race case that the Court agreed on Monday to review, Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections, brings the question of racial gerrymandering in redistricting plans back to the Court for the second time this Term — and in the second case involving Virginia. The other case, Wittman v. Personhubballah, involved congressional redistricting; it ultimately ended last month, when the Justices found that none of the challengers had a real legal stake in the case and dismissed it.
The new case focused on a plan that the Virginia legislature drew up in 2011, following a federal census, for the one hundred seats in its lower chamber, the House of Delegates. The challenge in federal court to the plan focused on twelve districts that were assigned a majority population of minorities. The claim was that each of those districts was the result of racial gerrymandering — in particular, the legislature’s decision to start with the premise that those districts should have at least a fifty-five-percent minority population.
The Supreme Court has ruled several times that it is unconstitutional to draw up districting maps if race was the “predominant factor” in drafting the boundaries and deciding who should or should not be included in given districts. In the House of Delegates case, a three-judge federal district court ruled that race was, in fact, the predominant factor in a single district, but even that one was not unconstitutional because it had been done to avoid violating federal civil rights law.
The challengers apparently enhanced their chances of getting their complaint heard by the Supreme Court by pointing out, in a later filing, that the decision in their case conflicted directly with a federal court’s ruling finding racial gerrymandering in the creation of two congressional districts in North Carolina.
The Supreme Court issued a major ruling on the racial gerrymandering issue last Term, in the case of Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama. Apparently, however, the Court is not yet satisfied that the decision went far enough to clarify its views on that subject.
The Court’s order on Monday granting review of Moore v. Texas will continue the Justices’ exploration of the basic question of when a person convicted of murder has such mental incapacity that he cannot be given a death sentence. A 2002 decision, Atkins v. Virginia, laid down the basic constitutional rule that intellectual disability is a condition that bars the death penalty.
That decision, however, left it to the states to determine just how to determine intellectual disability. The result has been the lack of a uniform approach. The Court tried in 2014, in the case of Hall v. Florida, to sort out further the scope of states’ options on this point, and that ruling stressed the need for states to rely on modern diagnostic standards, not simple IQ test scores.
In Texas, the state’s highest court in 2004 laid down its own standard on that question, relying upon a 1992 definition in the professional medical community — a standard that the same community now regards as out of date, because it does not focus enough on clinical evaluations of each individual.
The validity of the Texas approach was challenged in an appeal by lawyers for Bobby James Moore of Houston. He was convicted and sentence to death for the 1980 murder of a grocery store clerk during a robbery. Over the years, his attorneys have pursued various challenges to his conviction and death sentence. After the Supreme Court decided the Atkins case, his lawyers began a new challenge to the standards used to determine eligibility for a death sentence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal law, insisted that — until the state legislature stepped in — judges in Texas were still required to rely upon the 1992 standards.
Each of the three newly granted cases will come up for hearing and decision in the Court’s next Term, starting in October.

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