Let’s back up for a moment. When the president went to Europe, he was besieged by questions about the death penalty. It was hard enough defending the whole idea of capital punishment before nations that strongly oppose it, so Bush retreated a bit. “We should never execute anyone who is retarded,” the president said.
This was a nice, compassionate-sounding answer but it avoided the fact that Texas has executed six inmates with IQs under 70, the generally accepted threshold for retardation. Something that Bush says “should never” happen, did happen on his watch. Repeatedly. When the White House was asked if the president’s statement signaled any change in policy, the answer was no.
Huh? The White House position appears to be that if you don’t want to be seen as executing the mentally retarded, simply redefine the standard for retardation. But even this doesn’t wash. In recent days, some defenders of executing the retarded (a practice banned in almost every other country in the world) say that the IQ threshold should actually be 65, not 70. As it happens, a bill was introduced in the Texas Legislature in 1999 that set the standard at 65. Bush opposed it.
Two years later the politics of punishment have changed, and the politicians need to be a bit fuzzier to muddle through. In Europe, the president explained to puzzled journalists: “Our court system protects people who don’t understand the nature of the crime they’ve committed.”
Again, this sounded nice. But those who “don’t understand the nature of the crime they’ve committed” are mentally ill, not mentally retarded. The mentally retarded understand what they’ve done, but only as a child would. They typically have a mental age of 8 to 10 years. In several recent death-row cases, like that of Earl Washington in Virginia (recently released through DNA evidence), this has led the retarded to confess to crimes that they did not commit.
When he vetoed a bill last week banning the execution of the mentally retarded in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry, a Bush protege, said that it should be up to juries, not IQ tests, to determine the mental age of the defendant. Dudley Sharp, who heads Justice for All, the Texas pro-death-penalty group, argued that many inmates with IQs below 70 understand what they did and should therefore be executed. Here’s where the “multiple intelligences” comes in. The argument is that those with IQs below 70 may be mentally retarded, but they are morally of normal enough intelligence-and thus eligible for execution.
But why stop there? According to that logic if we’re going to execute adults with the mental capacity of 8-year-olds, why not execute 8-year-old killers themselves? This is not as crazy as it sounds. A Florida 12-year-old recently received a life sentence. In that sense the issue of executing the mentally retarded is part of a larger issue of how to treat children who commit crimes.
The whole subject gets even stranger when you think of it in the context of the president’s views on education and testing. Bush and company believe that juries, not tests, should determine the mental capacity of criminals-but that tests, not schools, should determine the mental capacity of school children. They’re apparently against social promotion everywhere except on death row. So the next time students score below a 70 on a standardized test, they might argue that while they failed the test “mentally” they passed it “morally.” Even if it makes their teachers wince, students can afford to make this presidential-style argument. Unlike the mentally retarded on death row, there’s no danger that they’ll pay for it with their lives.
