Texas Executes Mentally Disabled Man Based on Rules From John Steinbeck Novel

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&searchterm=texas+sign&search_group=#id=42587212&src=1a3556b2ad740ce336ac4e92021e8bb3-1-11">Henryk Sadura</a>/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Update, 7:02 p.m. EDT: The Supreme Court has denied a stay of execution for Marvin Wilson.

Update 2: Wilson was declared dead at 7:27 EDT on Tuesday.

Marvin Wilson sucked his thumb into his adulthood, reads at a second-grade level, has an IQ of 61, doesn’t know the difference between left and right, and as a child couldn’t wear a belt without cutting off his circulation. On Tuesday, barring a last-minute intervention from the US Supreme Court, he’ll be executed in Texas.

In 1992, Wilson murdered a police informant who had caught him dealing cocaine. Wilson had help—his lawyers still maintain that he didn’t pull the trigger—but the larger question isn’t about his guilt; it’s about his mental competence. The Supreme Court ruled in the 2002 case Atkins v. Virginia that states can’t execute the mentally disabled because it would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The evidence for Wilson’s incompetence is manifest. In addition to the facts listed above, his lawyers noted in a brief filed for the court that the only expert to professionally examine Wilson, a neuropsychologist, “concluded that Mr. Wilson had mild MR, the cognitive condition that precipitated the Atkins exemption.”

Texas’s interpretation of Atkins isn’t that mentally disabled people can’t be executed; it’s that there’s a threshold of disability at which execution is no longer acceptable. In other words, you can be mildly disabled and still fall beneath the “level and degree of [MR] at which a consensus of Texas citizens” would have a problem with your state-commissioned death. That is where things get really weird—because why should a “consensus of Texas citizens” have any input on what constitutes mental incompetence? Isn’t that what neuropsychologists are for?

It gets weirder. Texas’ standards for determining a convicted murderer’s mental competence came from the least scientific document imaginable—a John Steinbeck novel. As the Guardian‘s Ed Pilkington explained:

The determinants were posited around the character Lennie Small in Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men.

“Most Texas citizens,” the argument ran, “might agree that Steinbeck’s Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt” from execution. By implication anyone less impaired than Steinbeck’s fictional migrant ranch worker should have no constitutional protection.

Wilson is scheduled to be executed sometime after 7 p.m. EST.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate