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Bret L Bret L is offline
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Default Woods Executed

Woods Executed


"From the New York Times:


Killer with Low I.Q. Executed in Texas
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — Bobby Wayne Woods was executed Thursday evening in Texas
after his lawyers lost a battle to persuade the courts that he was too
mentally impaired to qualify for capital punishment.

Mr. Woods, 44, was convicted of raping and killing an 11-year-old
girl in 1997. He received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead
at 6:48 p.m. in the death chamber at a state prison in Huntsville,
Tex., after the United States Supreme Court denied a request from his
lawyers to stay his execution. His last words, at 6:40, we “Bye. I
am ready.”

Tests administered to Mr. Woods over the years placed his I.Q.
between 68 and 86, prompting a bitter debate between his lawyers and
the state over whether he was too impaired to face execution. The
state and federal courts repeatedly sided with prosecutors.

The debate reflects the gray area left by the Supreme Court in
2002, when it ruled that the mentally impaired were not eligible for
the death penalty but left it up to state courts to interpret which
inmates qualified as impaired.

Mr. Woods’s lawyers argued that his intelligence scores were low
enough that he should be spared because of the Supreme Court ban in
Atkins v. Virginia. Maurie Levin, a University of Texas law professor
who represented Mr. Woods, said in a pleading that “his I.Q. hovers
around 70, the magical cutoff point for determining whether someone is
mentally retarded.”

“He’s transparently childlike and simple,” she said before the
execution. “It’s a travesty.”


What's more like a child than rapist/murderer?

In its 2002 ruling, the Supreme Court said that to demonstrate
that someone is mentally retarded, one must prove that the person has
had low I.Q. scores and a lack of fundamental skills from a young age.
The court said a score on intelligence tests of “around 70” indicated
mental retardation.

But that standard has been applied unevenly by state courts,
according to a study by Cornell law professors. Some state courts in
Alabama, Mississippi and Texas have held that inmates with scores as
low as 66 are not impaired, while an inmate in California with a score
of 84 was declared mentally retarded.


How many people in California have IQs no higher than 84? Seven to
twelve million?

As I pointed out back in 2002 when the Supreme Court made its ruling,
that this decision reflects the lack of realism in elite institutions
about the distribution of IQ in America endemic . Any grandchild or
nephew that a Supreme Court Justice has with an IQ below 70 is almost
certainly organically retarded, with Down's Syndrome or other
impairment that makes him what cynical obstetricians call an FLK --
Funny Looking Kid. In contrast, there are large swathes of American
society where people with IQs below 70 are more likely just to be the
slow one in the family.

Courts in Texas repeatedly rejected Mr. Woods’s claims of
impairment, although the state’s highest criminal court halted his
execution last year to allow more hearings. That reprieve was lifted
in October, and this week, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles
voted unanimously to reject a clemency request.

As a child, Mr. Woods struggled in school and dropped out in the
seventh grade. He was barely literate and had to copy words from a
spelling list to write the simple notes he sent his family.

His intelligence was tested twice in grade school, and he received
scores of 80 and 78, but defense lawyers argued that those scores
should be adjusted downward to account for the age of the tests. As an
adult, he was tested just before his trial and scored 70. A second
full-scale test done in prison in 2002 showed him with an I.Q. of 68.
He scored higher on two short-form tests.

Still, the Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, argued in a motion
before the Supreme Court that the only times Mr. Woods had scored
under 70 was when the test was administered by an expert for the
defense. He also pointed out that Mr. Woods had successfully held jobs
as a short order cook and a roofer.

“The only experts to ever conclude that Woods was mentally
retarded did so after he had committed this murder and had motivation
to underperform,” Mr. Abbott wrote in his brief.

Mr. Woods was convicted of killing his former girlfriend’s
daughter. A jury determined he had abducted the 11-year-old girl,
Sarah Patterson, along with her brother, Cody, from the family’s home
in Granbury, Tex.. The girl was raped before her throat was slit. The
boy was severely beaten and left for dead, but he survived.


I dunno, but I kinda figure that "Thou shalt not kill" isn't that hard
to figure out.

By the way, Bobby Wayne Woods was white. That reminds me, when I went
to Rice in Texas in the 1970s, I heard that the Houston cops would say
that if they could just arrest a white guy named "Wayne" and a black
guy named "Charles Williams," there would be no more crime in Houston.
That was because every white guy they arrested said, "No, man, it
wasn't me, it was Wayne," and every black guy they arrested said, "No,
man, it wasn't me, it was that Charles Williams."

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/12/w...iq-exists.html
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