Mental Retardation

A federal court halted a Texas execution Wednesday, the second time in eight days that questions about an inmate's mental retardation temporarily spared him from the United States' busiest death chamber. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans granted Robert Charles Ladd a stay about nine hours before he was due to be put to death by lethal injection.

Doctors in Europe and Australia said last week that they have developed easier ways to detect fragile X syndrome, perhaps the most common cause of inherited mental retardation. The discoveries, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, are expected to help scientists unravel the complicated pattern of inheritance in the syndrome, which affects the so-called X-chromosome that determines sex.

A state appeals court Wednesday rejected a death row inmate's claim of mental retardation and refused to spare his life, despite an IQ of less than 70 and a jailhouse nickname of "Half-Deck" because of his slow thinking. No execution date has been set for Michael Wayne Hall, 25. "While there was significant evidence in favor of a finding of mental retardation, there was also significant evidence against such a finding," the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin ruled in a 7-2 opinion.

Hells Angel George (Gus) Christie Jr. said he is satisfied at last that mentally retarded children in Pottstown, Pa., will get the aid he intended when he raised $3,000 from fellow bikers and ran in the 1984 Olympic Torch Relay. Christie, 42, president of the Hells Angels in Ventura County, confirmed that a confidential settlement has been reached in a lawsuit he filed four years ago over how the money he raised should be distributed.

Before he went to prison, Anderson Hawthorne drove a car, held down a job, cared for a mentally ill brother and did chores in his family's home in South-Central Los Angeles. But Hawthorne also was regarded as slow in school, where he made it only to the ninth grade. He mispronounced simple words and had difficulty reading. At age 12, he couldn't count pocket change or read street names, and knew his ABCs only up to the letter M.

On her 40th birthday last June, Martha Billington moved out of the tidy shingled house that she grew up in in Melrose, Mass. As friends and family helped load her belongings onto a rented truck, Martha climbed into the cab and beeped the horn in happy celebration. Martha Billington, born with Down syndrome in 1962, was leaving the nest.

Federal health officials Friday proposed long-awaited rules for nursing homes requiring that nurses aides meet competency standards and that residents be screened for mental illness and retardation. The rules proposed by Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan carry out some of the major nursing home reforms enacted by Congress in 1987. "We've waited a very long time to get these regulations.

Lab mice with the mental retardation of Down syndrome got smarter after being fed a drug that strengthened brain circuits involved in learning and memory, researchers reported Sunday. After receiving once-daily doses of pentylenetetrazole, or PTZ, for 17 days, the mice could recognize objects and navigate mazes as well as normal mice did, researchers said. The improvements lasted up to two months after the drug was discontinued, according to the report in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The articles regarding the missing developmentally disabled youth, Eric Schimmel, dramatically illustrate that the major barrier a person with disability faces daily is not his disability, but the lack of understanding and acceptance of his disability by others. In the United States alone there are 43 million disabled people and many non-disabled Americans will at some time in their life experience a temporary disability. However, attitudes toward the disabled continue to be based upon misinformation and ignorance.