02-03-2015, 10:55 AM
LAST WEEK -- THE LOW IQ EXECUTIONS
Robert Ladd was executed in Texas last Thursday.
He measured a 67 IQ when he was 13. The typical bar for executions is 70, but adult evaluations showed that he was mentally competent.
Ladd was executed for the 1996 slaying of 38-year-old Vicki Ann Garner, of Tyler, who was strangled and beaten with a hammer. Her arms and legs were bound, bedding was placed between her legs, and she was set on fire in her apartment.
The really retarded part of the story is that Ladd had previously been convicted of killing a woman and her two children. He served 1⁄3 of a 40 year sentence as was out on parole when he killed Garner.
Warren Lee Hill was executed in Georgia last Tuesday.
He was a former petty officer in the Navy, was sentenced to life in prison in 1986 after shooting and killing his 18-year-old girlfriend, Myra Wright. Four years later, he used a nail-studded board to batter to death a fellow inmate. A jury sentenced him to death.
During his 1991 trial, Hill did not claim to be intellectually disabled. Yet throughout his last two decades on death row, attorneys have sparred over the issue of his mental impairment, and the extent to which he is morally culpable for his crimes. He had a reported IQ 70 and his execution had been postponed at the last minute four times. Last week, he'd run out of legal options.
Robert Ladd was executed in Texas last Thursday.
He measured a 67 IQ when he was 13. The typical bar for executions is 70, but adult evaluations showed that he was mentally competent.
Ladd was executed for the 1996 slaying of 38-year-old Vicki Ann Garner, of Tyler, who was strangled and beaten with a hammer. Her arms and legs were bound, bedding was placed between her legs, and she was set on fire in her apartment.
The really retarded part of the story is that Ladd had previously been convicted of killing a woman and her two children. He served 1⁄3 of a 40 year sentence as was out on parole when he killed Garner.
Warren Lee Hill was executed in Georgia last Tuesday.
He was a former petty officer in the Navy, was sentenced to life in prison in 1986 after shooting and killing his 18-year-old girlfriend, Myra Wright. Four years later, he used a nail-studded board to batter to death a fellow inmate. A jury sentenced him to death.
During his 1991 trial, Hill did not claim to be intellectually disabled. Yet throughout his last two decades on death row, attorneys have sparred over the issue of his mental impairment, and the extent to which he is morally culpable for his crimes. He had a reported IQ 70 and his execution had been postponed at the last minute four times. Last week, he'd run out of legal options.