Talk about a failing an exam! The polarized Supreme Court drew a clearer line of death. This time, however, the liberal faction wrestled Roberts’ faction down to the ground in a 5–4 decision indicating the artifice underlying who qualifies as stepping over this line. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in Hall v. Florida, suggested that the IQ exam should be less mechanical.
A convict of a capital crime can be executed with an IQ of 71, but not if he has an IQ of only 70. Even now, when we’re no longer as keen on IQ tests (since any standardized test, as we all well know, is rather unreliable and funky as our kids move through the No Child Left Behind era).
The ruling affecting this convicted prisoner with cognitive impairments will also affect many others (up to eight states immediately, not including California, which got rid of capital punishment long, long ago). Some experts conclude that anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the prison population would fail this exam. And of course, as Adam Liptak reported, many prisoners have multitudes of mental issues. After all, to kill a certain number of people, or to perform a certain types of heinous murders, qualifies you instantly as a madman.
This all started in the 2002 case Atkins v. Virginia, when the Supreme Court decided that persons with cognitive impairments had to be smart enough to execute. Resentful, all those state-executioner governors in Florida and Texas did what they can do when you’re interested in sabotaging the federal government: They sat down those capital convicts in exam rooms and began implementing IQ tests before looking for intravenous veins in other exam rooms.
But “here’s the thing”: Madmen and cognitively impaired men, no matter how much we’re looking at their brains or when we can later pickle their brains for our own exam rooms, are not the same thing (and don’t get me wrong, I’m not for killing anybody).
