Texas Don't Care
I read this article in the Guardian today, Texas set to execute death row inmate diagnosed as 'mentally retarded'. I found the whole thing appalling.“A death row prisoner who has been medically diagnosed as “mentally retarded” and therefore exempt from execution is set to die on Tuesday in Texas, a state that rejects scientific consensus and instead applies its own definition of learning difficulties based on a character in a John Steinbeck novel.
Barring a last minute intervention by the courts, Marvin Wilson, 54, will be put to death by lethal injection even though he has been subjected to scientifically-recognized tests that show him to be intellectually disabled – or “mentally retarded” as the US legal system still calls the condition.”
If you ask me, the people who sentenced the poor guy to death ought to punished or expelled from their offices. I don’t care how long a state has been executing prisoners and what their rules are, when they are dealing with somebody who has been “diagnosed as mentally retarded” then the judges need to put a person like that in a hospital or appropriate facility.
In this case, Texas has chosen to go against a previous ruling "that patients with banned executions for all such prisoners under the Eighth Amendment of the constitution that prohibits excessive punishment." Texas made up its own rules. What the court system in Texas is doing is only damaging their reputation, because it just goes to show that they really don’t care who you are, compared to what you have done. In a situation like this it is clear that the judicial system of Texas will execute people based on their own interpretation of the law, even if its different than what most states would do or what most people in Texas would support. If I were the president, I would go down to Texas myself and stop this nonsense.
Photograph from the Guardian
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