The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a man with an IQ of 67 who had been on Texas' death row for 17 years deserved another chance to challenge his sentence, a decision that could affect dozens of other condemned inmates in Texas.
The 6-3 decision said the federal appeals court in New Orleans had paid only lip service to the proper federal standard for when a condemned prisoner was entitled to have his case reviewed.
Sixty to 100 inmates on Texas's death row might benefit from the ruling, lawyers involved in the case said.
The contested issue was whether the jury in Robert J. Tennard's 1986 Houston murder trial had been given instructions that effectively communicated the latitude they had on whether to give Tennard a life sentence.
Tennard, a convicted rapist on parole, stabbed a man 15 times after he and several others had been drinking and smoking marijuana. One of Tennard's friends used a hatchet to kill another man at the gathering. The other defendant received a life sentence.
When Tennard, then 23, was tried, the jury was aware of his low IQ. However, at the time, jurors in capital cases in Texas were told to determine the appropriate punishment by considering two "special issues": whether the crime was committed deliberately and whether the defendant posed a risk of danger in the future.
In 1991, Texas changed its law and now provides jurors with more explicit instructions about weighing aggravating and mitigating circumstances. The Texas Legislature had acted in the wake of a 1989 Supreme Court ruling, Penry vs. Lynaugh, which held that Texas' two-question approach was a constitutionally inadequate vehicle that did not allow jurors to consider and give effect to the mitigating evidence of mental retardation and childhood abuse.
Tennard asked for a resentencing hearing based on the Penry decision. That request was rejected by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which ruled that "there is no evidence ... [that Tennard's] low IQ rendered him unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct when he committed the offense, or that his low IQ rendered him unable to learn from his mistakes ... or control his impulses."
That decision was upheld by a federal district judge in Houston and by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which has jurisdiction over constitutional challenges to death penalty cases from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
