SCOTUS Rejects Texas’s Death Penalty Standards for Disabled Inmates –

This could be huge for other states to follow suit regarding mental competence and the death penalty.

Texas’s standards for evaluating mentally disabled death row inmates are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

Until Tuesday, when asked to determine if an inmate was too mentally disabled to execute, Texas relied on a medical definition from 1992, since superseded, and a set of nonclinical factors known as the “Lennie standard.” That’s Lennie as in Lennie Small, the sweet-natured but simple-minded character from Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”

– See more at: http://blogs.findlaw.com/supreme_court/2017/03/scotus-rejects-texass-death-penalty-standards-for-disabled-inmates.html?DCMP=NWL-pro_scotus#sthash.yZFpcYkU.dpuf