Source: http://iqmrdeathpenalty.blogspot.com/2010/03/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 00:26:48+00:00

Document:
Ortiz v US (2007) has been added to the Court Decisions (n=93) blog roll section.
The AAIDD web site now has three video interviews available for viewing that deal with three broad topics related to the new green manual. The titles, presenters, and links are provided below. Click here for prior blomgaster (Dr. Kevin McGrew) critiques of the manual's chapter on intellectual functioning.
general info on criminal justice issues.
Interesting article in University of Georgia Law School Review that presents a conceptual framework for understanding judicial decision making. Article is called "Decisional Sequencing" and is written by Peter Rutledge. Abstract and link to article download can be found by clicking here. An interesting conceptual lens framework is presented and discussed.
iPost: Franklins review of "Criminal Responsibility"
Karen Franklin has a nice review of the book "Criminal Responsibility"
The findings suggest that the WAIS-III produces higher scores than the WISC-IV in people with intellectual disabilities. This has implications for definitions of intellectual disability and suggests that Psychologists should be cautious when interpreting and reporting IQ scores on the WAIS-III and WISC-IV.
Click here to find all the death penalty blogs listed at the ABA Blawg Review.
A couple of recent Atkins cases where the state agreed to waive death because the defendant was ID. It is nice to see the prosecutors willing to admit that someone is MR/ID when it is clear. There is hope for correct implementation for Atkins cases. Thanks to Kevin Foley for alerting me to these updates.
Oregon murder defendant, James Demetri Davenport, will not face death. According to the March 20th Statesman Journal, "Marion County prosecutors dropped plans to seek the death penalty against Davenport after his mental disability was confirmed by separate evaluations performed by experts hired by defense lawyers and the prosecution, said Matt Kemmy, a deputy district attorney."
Arkansas, defendant Normal Brandon Dewayne Johnson, will also not face the death penalty. According to the March 13th Arkansas Democate Gazette, " Prosecutors on Thursday dropped their plans to seek the death penalty against a 22-year-old Little Rock man accused in a string of armed holdups and shootings that left three men dead, including a university instructor, after doctors determined him to be mentally retarded. "Arkansas law and U.S. Supreme Court precedent bar the execution of mentally retarded defendants whose IQs are 65 or below. Testing at the State Hospital in Little Rock measured Brandon Dewayne Johnson's IQ at 55, according to a mental health evaluation filed in Pulaski County Circuit Court on Tuesday."
Research Briefs 3-23-10: Why does the public want to be tough on crime?
Unnever, J. D., & Cullen, F. T. (2010). THE SOCIAL SOURCES OF AMERICANS' PUNITIVENESS: A TEST OF THREE COMPETING MODELS*. Criminology, 48(1), 99-129.
The sustained movement to "get tough" on crime, especially through mass imprisonment, has prompted several prominent efforts to explain the public's harshness toward crime. From the extant literature, we demarcate the following three competing theories of public punitiveness: the escalating crime-distrust model, the moral decline model, and the racial animus model. Controlling for other known predictors of crime-related opinions, we test the explanatory power of these perspectives to account for support for the death penalty and for a punitive crime-control approach. Our analysis of a national sample of respondents surveyed in the 2000 National Election Study reveals partial support for each model. Racial animus, however, seems to exert the most consistent effect on public sentiments. This finding suggests that racial resentments are inextricably entwined in public punitiveness and thus should be incorporated into any complete theory of this phenomenon.
Hughs v Epps (MI, 2010). March 3, 2010 death penalty decision vacated as per Atkins.
Parrish v KY (2008, 2010) has just been posted to the Court Decisions blog roll.
Sometimes the decisions in Atkins cases don’t make sense, or the court simply fails to supply sufficient facts to allow the reader to draw the appropriate conclusions. An example of a deficient decision can be found in the matter of Melvin Lee Parrish. The Kentucky Supreme Court denied Parrish’s intellectual disability (mental retardation) claim, asserting that the evidence from his original trial, which was held prior to Atkins, showed that he was not mentally retarded. The court specifically noted that, “a psychologist at Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center (KCPC) [who examined and tested Parrish] . . . testified that Appellant’s IQ was 79 and that a previous IQ score of 68 from when Appellant was fifteen was the result of a lack of motivation.” What is lacking in the court’s decision is any explanation of what facts allowed the expert to conclude that there was “a lack of motivation” on the part of Parrish. Ostensibly, the court used the so-called lack of motivation to create the inference that the score of 68 was invalid, and thus of little consequence.
To confuse the reader even more, in a later section of the decision, when discussing the “mitigation” evidence, the court stated that there was testimony from the “County Director of Special Education, who ‘testified at length’ about Appellant’s time at Oldham County High School, including his ‘IQ and reading test scores, as well as his performance in classes for the educationally mentally handicapped’”. The designation “educationally mentally handicapped” likely means that the school system considered Parrish to be mildly mentally retarded. Or, in other words, that the IQ test score of 68, obtained when Parrish was 15, was in fact a valid estimation of Parrish’s level of intellectual functioning at the time. Unfortunately, the court supplied so few facts, that the reader of the decision is left to guess what the facts might have been.
Consistent with the above, the court makes no mention of which tests were administered to Parrish. It is quite possible that the 79 IQ score was obtained on an obsolete or “old” version of the WAIS, and that, arguably, the obtained IQ score should have been adjusted for the Flynn Effect. And if one added to the analysis the standard error of measurement (SEM), one could argue that Parrish’s IQ was well within the range for a diagnosis of mental retardation. But, reading the decision, one can only guess what tests were given, and whether the issues of the Flynn Effect and the SEM were even raised in the case.
When a court publishes a decision like this, it creates serious negative impressions - one, perhaps the court was obfuscating the true facts; two, perhaps the court did not understand the nature of the issues and the underlying science; or three, the court does not like the holding of Atkins and is simply giving such cases a short shrift. Of course, the alternative interpretation may hold true as well – that the court may have given the case an honest look and it did what it thought was appropriate under the circumstances. But one thing is clear, this was a poorly written decision that left out important facts – as well as the court’s discussion of those facts - that the both the litigants and the public were entitled to know.
Parrish’s mental retardation claim still has some life left to it. A federal district habeas court recently denied the state’s motion to dismiss Parrish’s mental retardation claim on the basis that it was procedurally defaulted.
1 Parrish v. Commonwealth, 272 S.W. 2d 161, 167, Case No. 2006-SC-000592-MR (Ky. 2008), Slip op. at pg. 5.
2 Id. at 10, slip op. at pg. 10.
3 The precise phrases and terms used throughout the country – especially many years ago – differed somewhat; however, the phrases “educationally mentally handicapped,” “educably mentally handicapped, and “educably mentally retarded” can be considered synonymous, and are thought to concern mildly mentally retarded students. For example, Professor Rogers Elliott used “educably mentally retarded” (EMR) and “educably mentally handicapped” (EMH) synonymously in his book which analyzed the landmark lawsuits, Larry P. v. Riles, 343 F. Supp. 1306 (N.D. Cal. 1972); 495 F. Supp. 926 (N.D. Cal. 1979) and PASE v. Hannon, 506 F. Supp. 831 (N.D. Ill. 1980). Rogers Elliott, Litigating Intelligence 1 (1987). See also, Pickens v. State, 126 P. 3d 612 (Okla. Crim. App. 2005) (Pickens, who was educationally mentally handicapped when in school, was deemed to meet the Oklahoma Atkins standard) and People v. McMullen, 410 N.E. 2d 1174 (Ill. App. 1980) (testimony given that students who were educationally mentally handicapped had IQs between 50 and 70-7, the range associated with mild mental retardation).
4 Memorandum Opinion and Order, Parrish v. Simpson, Case No. 3:09-CV-254-H (W.D. Ky., Feb. 26, 2010).
EDITORIAL: "Death Row's Elimination Would Save State Money"
<page13.jpg>The results of a poll of police chiefs recently featured in DPIC's report "Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis" is now available in the form of a slide presentation on the Web, suitable for use in workshops or discussion groups. The poll, commissioned by DPIC and conducted by R.T. Strategies of Washington, DC, surveyed a national sample of 500 randomly selected U.S. police chiefs on questions regarding the death penalty and reducing violent crime. Although the police chiefs did not oppose the death penalty philosophically, they found it to be an ineffective crime fighting tool. Among those surveyed, only 1% of the chiefs listed greater use of the death penalty as the best way to reduce violence. The poll also showed police chiefs ranking the death penalty as the least efficient use of taxpayers' money among programs to fight crime. Most of the police chiefs did not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder.
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Independent examination of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV): What does the WAIS-IV measure?
by Benson, Nicholas; Hulac, David M.; Kranzler, John H.
The state Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of the state's execution process.
OLYMPIA, Wash. — The state Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of the state's execution process.
Thursday morning, the high court will hear debate on whether one aspect of a lawsuit filed by a death row inmate who is challenging the constitutionality of death penalty procedures is now moot because of a recent change made by the state Department of Corrections.
Earlier this month, the state revealed that it was changing its method of execution from a three-drug cocktail to a one-drug system.
The court will also consider whether the department has the authority to draft execution policy and whether lethal injection violates federal laws because a doctor doesn't obtain or administer the drugs.
Detection of malingered mental retardation.
Shandera, Anne L.; Berry, David T. R.; Clark, Jessica A.; Schipper, Lindsey J.; Graue, Lili O.; Harp, Jordan P.
Another death penalty related Law Review article (click here) by Meghan Ryan, which builds on her prior article related to the eight ammendment.
The wisdom of the death penalty has recently come under attack in a number of states. This raises the question of whether states’ retreat from the death penalty, or other punishments, will pressure other states—either politically or constitutionally—to similarly abandon the punishment. Politically, states may succumb to the trend of jettisoning a penalty. Constitutionally, states may be forced to surrender the penalty if the punishment is considered cruel, and, as a result of a large number of states renouncing the penalty, the punishment also becomes unusual. If a punishment is thus found to be both cruel and unusual, it will be proscribed under the Eighth Amendment Punishments Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Considering the disappearance of some punishments and emergence of new punishments, whether a punishment is cruel under the Punishments Clause is an important question. Curiously, there has been very little discussion of what constitutes a cruel punishment, as distinguished from whether a punishment is also unusual. This Article examines the concept of cruelty as enshrined in the Eighth Amendment Punishments Clause and suggests that the Supreme Court ought to focus on this elusive concept through its independent judgment analysis. The Article emphasizes that such an independent judgment focus on cruelty should be constrained by specific, identified factors and that these factors should go beyond examining the penological purposes of punishment. The Article asserts that motive and the nature and quality of a punishment are central to the concept of cruelty and suggests that a more nuanced understanding of punishment rationales, supplemented by factors focused on elements such as the bloody or lingering nature of the punishment, is necessary in properly determining whether a punishment is cruel under the Punishments Clause.
This study examines the social-psychological factors of attributional styles, moral disengagement, and the value-expressive function of attitudes in relation to death penalty support and the robustness of that support. Respondents were first asked whether or not they supported the death penalty and were then presented several paragraphs of information exposing flaws or failures in the death penalty and asked how compelling they found the information and whether it impacted their death penalty attitudes. Results suggest that attributional style has little if any effect on death penalty support and that only a few aspects of moral disengagement seem to play a role. Value-expressiveness, on the other hand, appears to play a critical role in death penalty attitudes and support. Our findings suggest that when support is based on value-expressive foundations, it is more robust and unlikely to wane regardless of information or knowledge indicating problems with the death penalty.

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