Court Opinion

ID: 9812335
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 22:38:59.329335+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:24:46.688121
License: Public Domain

CONCURRING OPINION

PRICE, J.,
filed a concurring opinion.
I join Parts I and IIA of the Court’s opinion today and otherwise concur in the result. I do not join Part IIB. For present purposes, suffice it to say that I continue to disagree with the Court’s decidedly non-diagnostic approach to evaluating the adaptive-deficits prong of the standard for determining intellectual disability vel non.1 Particularly after the recent opinion of the United States Supreme Court in Hall v. Florida,21 should think that the writing is on the wall for the future viability of Ex parte Briseno,3

. See Peggy M. Tobolowsky, Different Path Taken: Texas Capital Offenders' Post-Atkins Claims of Mental Retardation, 39 Hastings Const. L.Q. 1, 123-25, 163-66 (Fall 2011) (discussing and quoting extensively from my unpublished dissenting opinion in Lizcano v. State, No. AP-75,879, 2010 WL 1817772 (Tex.Crim.App. delivered May 5, 2010) (not designated for publication)).

. - U.S. -, 134 S.Ct. 1986, 188 L.Ed.2d 1007 (2014). Hall found Florida's approach to determining the first prong of the standard for intellectual disability, the significantly-subaverage-general-intellectual-functioning prong, to be unconstitutionally narrow. In my view, Texas’s approach to determining the second prong, the adaptive-deficits prong, is unconstitutionally over-inclusive — insufficiently tied to the clinical diagnostic criteria and all too open to non-scientific, impressionistic considerations to withstand Eighth Amendment scrutiny. Tobolowsky, 39 Hast. Const. L.Q. at 163-66 (citing and quoting from Lizcano v. State, 2010 WL 1817772, at *32-40 (Price, J., dissenting)).

. 135 S.W.3d 1 (Tex.Crim.App.2004). See Tobolowsky, 39 Hast. Const. L.Q. at 173 ("[T]he Briseno factors remain a leading candidate for [Supreme] Court scrutiny.”).