In Atkins v. Virginia (2002), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits capital punishment for individuals with "mental retardation," as the court referred to it. The use of that phrase rather than the current diagnostic label "intellectual disability" highlights the fact that there is no built-in mechanism in law to update judicial decisions to incorporate state-of-the-art science. Once the Supreme Court issues a decision using the term "mental retardation," there is no automatic way to adapt the decision to include new evidence-based conceptualizations of the disorder.
A case now pending before the Supreme Court, Moore v. Texas (2015), highlights what can happen when static judicial decisions lag behind current understandings of a disorder. In 1980, Bobby James Moore shot and killed a store clerk during a robbery of a grocery store in Houston. Moore was convicted and sentenced to death. After a lengthy appeals process, he was granted a new sentencing hearing in 2001 and again was sentenced to death.
On appeal from the 2001 death sentence, a Texas appellate court ruled that while Moore did meet the current criteria for intellectual disability, he did not meet the 1992 criteria for intellectual disability that had been previously adopted by the court as the relevant legal standard. That 1992 standard, for example, relied upon strict cut scores on IQ tests. As a result, the court found, Moore's death sentence was not barred by Atkins (2002).
Moore has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Texas court's decision to rely on its previously adopted 1992 definition to determine if he has an intellectual disability is not supported by our modern understanding of disability—and as a result, would lead to an unconstitutional death sentence. APA, the American Psychiatric Association and several other professional organizations have filed an amicus brief in support of Moore's argument that the Texas court erred when it did not follow the current professional consensus of what constitutes intellectual disability in its proceedings. As the amicus brief argues, failure to adopt the current professional standard robs the court of the opportunity to make a decision based upon the most recent science.
The scientific method is a never-ending circular process in which discoveries and advancements in understanding are incorporated into current practice and subsequent research. The law, on the other hand, evolves, but only one case at a time. Instead of new cases automatically incorporating state-of-the-art scientific understanding, the science must be relitigated with every case. Legal appeals can—and not infrequently do—take decades to reach conclusion. Given the lack of a mechanism to incorporate evolving science into a case during the pendency of appeals, a judicial decision relying upon scientific evidence runs the risk of being obsolete, from a scientific perspective, as soon as it is issued. Moore v. Texas presents an opportunity for the Supreme Court to remedy this problem, at least in the context of whether to impose the death penalty on individuals with an intellectual disability.
"Judicial Notebook" is a project of APA's Div. 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues).
