We’re so awesome we execute the mentally challenged:
Marvin Wilson, the two-time armed robber who fatally beat and shot a Beaumont police informer he thought responsible for his arrest on a drug charge, was executed Tuesday at the state’s Huntsville death house.
Wilson’s case, in which his lawyers argued he was mentally retarded, fueled global outrage among anti-death penalty activists. Passions rose to such a pitch that even the intellectually challenged protagonist of John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella “Of Mice and Men” indirectly was sucked into the fray.
Wilson’s lawyers unsuccessfully argued that an IQ test on which the killer scored 61 – nine points below the standard for competency – should have saved him from execution under a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling barring execution of the mentally retarded.
Scalia denied the stay.
ruemara
You can’t deny, in our vengeance-fueled collective consciousness, we are highly exceptional compared to our peers. Compared to the 3rd world religious oligarchies we aim to devolve into, we’re quite typical.
MattF
Was this the ‘punishment is cruel, but not unusual’ case?
hueyplong
We can only hope that the God Scalia professes to worship is the one he gets.
replicnt6
Hey, you can’t make a “party of life” without breaking a few eggs.
cathyx
Who is this John Cole posting so early in the morning? Is he new?
jon
I’ll sleep easier knowing he’s dead, rather than getting slowly more and more retarded as he sits in his small, undecorated cell, forgotten like thousands of others in similar confinement.
I’m unsure if I’m being facetious.
cathyx
@jon: That’s easy for you to say that he’s better off dead than in a cell, but you certainly can’t speak for him.
Tokyokie
Scalia goes for those fascist Opus Dei church teachings when it comes to marginalizing women, but with capital punishment, not so much. Bet he gave himself some extra lashes for good measure after denying the stay.
SGEW
The phrase “American Exceptionalism” is starting to sound an awful lot like “Peculiar Institution.”
Mattminus
Texas, where executing a mentally retarded man lowers the average IQ of the state.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Good to see Scalia is one of those wagging his fingers about the lack of morality in our society. He would know.
General Stuck
Well, Somebody had to pay for Obamacare
replicnt6
@SGEW:
Well said.
Elizabelle
How very Catholic of Justice (sic) Scalia.
maya
@hueyplong: One of his sons is a priest so he obviously believes he’s got an “in” in the hereafter. He’s got a special sky-booth over at the extreme right side of God.
maven
Scalia denied the stay; tightened the cilice to maximum; then got an erection.
What a psycho.
Culture of Truth
If I were Rick Perry I’m not sure I’d want to go down this road.
Cassidy
@maya: He’s got an “in” alright. If the Satan these fucksticks believe in is real, he already has a pit waiting.
AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!
mk3872
AND 6 of the 7 people executed this year in Texas are black.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@hueyplong: I would tremble for Scalia if I thought there were a just God.
@Elizabelle: Scalia is on record as saying the Pope is infallible only when he agrees with Scalia. At least he’s honest about it.
I don’t suppose fat Timmy Dolan, Weaselly Frankie George or any of the other Beanies bestirred themselves to forcefully advocate for the teachings and moral authority of Mother Church? Of course, EJ Dionne will point out that nuns run soup kitchens, so shut up.
Just Some Fuckhead
Scalia actually referred the stay for execution to the full court for a reliable denial. If yer gonna kill a retard, best to hide in a group.
jon
@cathyx: Irony is not just a description of Red Sonja’s bra and panty set.
Dork
Is there no legal quantified IQ value for mental retardation? So the SCOTUS ruled in 2002 that someone mentally retarded cannot be 86’d, and they didn’t put in their ruling an actual IQ value for legally defining this condition? WTF?
f they did, upon what basis could Scalia deny his lawyers?
Steve
@Dork: As we keep trying to explain to the Steve Sailers of the world, IQ is not some magic, unassailable number that explains everything. Even if the Supreme Court announced a precise number, do you expect it to specify the test questions as well?
amk
This is the real ‘murkan exceptionalism.
SatanicPanic
@Culture of Truth: That’s like the 5th comment in a row by you that I have lol’d at.
Litlebritdifrnt
OT but Portman’s wiki page is being edited to death by someone. There were tons of edits all day yesterday.
Steve
@Litlebritdifrnt: Now that the methodology of counting Wikipedia edits is widely known, I doubt it means a whole lot any more.
peorgietirebiter
Executing a mentally challenged man might be the least of judicial atrocities commited down here.
I suppose it could have beem worse. no ome disputes that Wilson did commit the offense.
Give us time.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Steve:
I agree, and it could actually be a false flag.
MikeJ
@Litlebritdifrnt: Most of the edits came after the NPR story. The most interesting thing about it was that the edits that triggered the story all came from an account that had never edited any other pages. I may have to write a spider that counts number of articles edited for each editor of a political page.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Litlebritdifrnt: I wonder how many paid Romney staffers are on Wiki instantly deleting “Rob Portman was Director of the Office of Managemnet and Budget when George W Bush managed to direct the budget into massive debt with unfunded wars and massive tax cuts for the rich. Mr Portman did not resign when Vice President Dick Cheney declared that Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter”
The way that little phrase disappeared down the Village memory hole should be surprising.
Zifnab
@cathyx: He can’t speak for him. He’s mentally retarded. That’s kind of the point.
Either way, I think Jon was bemoaning the pitiful state of the US prison system more than extolling the moral virtue of hanging’em high and letting God sort out the details.
peorgietirebiter
@Dork: I believe it was left to the states to set their own metric.
Chris
@SGEW:
QFT.
I can’t think of a single concept in American politics that needs to fucking die more painfully than American Exceptionalism. As long as this country doesn’t realize our shit smells just like everybody else’s, our ability to evolve and fix our problems will remain in serious trouble.
David Hunt
@Dork:
It’s my understanding that the IQ test was created for the specific purpose of measuring various forms of mental retardation and that it’s quite good at it. I doubt that there is a legal definition of mental retardation, but, even without looking at actual research, I’m confident that there’s a widely accepted measure of various stages of being mentally challenged.
All of this is irrelevant, however. Scalia was in the dissent on the case that ruled it unconstitutional to execute a mentally retarded person when the case was ruled on back in ’02 along with Thomas and Renquist. IIRC, his argument was effectively that it was too much trouble to figure out if the person in question was a really retarded versus faking it, so kill ’em all.
Given that, I’m not at all surprised that he’s okay with Texas blatantly ignoring a SC ruling because he’d like that particular ruling to be ignored. It’s just the Rule of Law that’s being destroyed. Nothing important…
elmo
@Chris:
I used to have a seriously tea-party co-worker, and I was engaging him one day trying to pin down why he hated Obama so much. One thing he kept returning to was this idea that Obama had claimed the Constitution was “flawed” when it was written.
Well, wait, I said. You’re claiming it wasn’t flawed?
Of course it wasn’t flawed, said he.
So it was flawless? Perfect?
It was flawless for the time, he said.
Arguing with him was useless. Slavery, women’s suffrage, equal protection — hell, even the Bill of Rights — all of those were meaningless in the face of the FLAWLESS HOLY CONSTITUTION.
Every later change that made it better – just more perfection heaped onto existing perfection. He was very serious, and this was not a dumb guy. But it was literally an article of faith with him that the Constitution was perfect at inception, and has always been perfect no matter the alteration.
I don’t think he’s unusual among his Tea Party cohort.
Hungry Joe
@jon:
I have no idea what that means, but I like it a lot.
celticdragonchick
@elmo:
Exactly. Remember that painting showing the Constitution as a holy document being handed over by Jesus? The one that Hannity says is one of his favorites?
The notion that the Constitution is actual divinely inspired holy scripture is real, real big in the Fox News/TeaTard crowd.
dr. bloor
@Dork:
A low score on a measure of intellectual ability does not automatically lead to a diagnosis of Mental Retardation. The diagnosis requires other signs/symptoms of intellectual disability and impaired adaptive functioning. I see people with some frequency who test in the 60’s and low 70’s, but who don’t even approach a diagnosis of MR.
Steve
@David Hunt: As someone noted above, Scalia didn’t deny the stay singlehandedly, he referred the application to the full court which then upheld his denial of the stay (this is standard procedure). There was no recorded dissent from the denial of the stay, which I would expect if some of the Justices though this was a flagrant violation of the prohibition against executing the mentally retarded.
cathyx
@jon: Ok, maybe I got my hackles up a little too quickly. But you did say you weren’t sure you were being facetious, and many people do think that death is better than jail. I would rather be dead than spend the rest of my life in jail, but I wouldn’t presume everyone would feel that way.
Tehanu
The “pro-life” party thinks it’s perfectly OK to execute a mentally retarded man. Can I go all Godwin now?
Ella in New Mexico
@Dork:
Look, pay attention, woodya?
1. IQ test scores are absolutely valid and reliable when we are talking about racial discrepancies in intellectual ability, aka “The Bell Curve”. Just ask Andrew Sullivan.
2. These same test scores are highly suspect, and should be ignored because it’s obvious the person is way more intelligent than their IQ number infers ONLY IN THE LEGAL SYSTEM, aka, “Scalia’s rule”.
God,how hard is that to understand? What are you, retarded or something?
Just Some Fuckhead
@elmo:
No, and I think that while originally contrived and astroturfed, the modern tea party movement is essentially White Christian Nationalism with Calvinism as the political theology and the Constitution as the Sacred Text.
jon
@cathyx: I was much more facetious about the sleeping better portion. It’s rare that someone escapes anymore, and this guy wasn’t a likely candidate for outside work crews or Great Escape plans.
Cromagnon
Has anyone considered the possibility that one could do poorly on an IQ test on purpose? Say when it may be in your interest to do so?
Elizabelle
Well, I sure feel a lot safer today with that mentally impaired black guy dead.
Not like he was roaming the streets or anything.
Sad.
Elizabelle
Well, I sure feel a lot safer today with that mentally impaired black guy dead.
Not like he was roaming the streets or anything.
Sad.
Ruckus
What a lovely country. I’m glad I enlisted during war to defend… the indefensible. First that we have a death penalty in the first place. Second that we use it so wisely. In the scheme of things how important is this anyway? It’s not like we kill just anyone.
Time sure has a way of focusing and clarifying the important things in life. Money and power. And I used to be so naive, thinking it was abut people. Shit can I think small or what? Anything that gets in the way of that just has to go. Laws, rights, people, they all have to go for a little(OK a fucking lot) more money and power for the chosen.
burnspbesq
Bitch at Scalia all you want, but don’t forget that Rick Perry could have stopped this execution and didn’t.
WhartonTears
I wonder if Marvin saved his pie for later.
Chris
@elmo:
Denying American Exceptionalism among conservatives is pretty much like denying God in a Bible-belt megachurch. (And I don’t doubt that the guy is smart: all cults are filled with normal people who for whatever reason have chosen to set aside reason on this or these particular issues).
It’s even more absurd that they insist on it so much in an era that’s so completely shaped by American power, culture and institutions. In a world with a McDonald’s on every street corner, U.S. Navy carriers in every ocean and liberal democracy now the default model against which all political systems are measured, it makes no fucking sense to claim there’s anything “exceptional” about America anymore.