Bulletin: Bobby James Moore; Duane Buck: Dallas Morning News welcomes the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to scrutinize the way Texas implements the death penalty by taking on their cases..."Both cases show the importance of Supreme Court scrutiny of the way Texas imposes the death penalty. The review is so critical because once imposed, an execution can never be undone. We can’t allow ourselves to forget how human, and therefore inescapably fallible, the process leading up to a death sentence is."

"The Supreme Court has agreed once again to scrutinize the way Texas implements the death penalty. Rejecting Texas’ arguments that they need not interfere, at least four justices in each case decided that circumstances were unusual enough to merit another look. We welcome that scrutiny, and so should Texas. One case in particular reveals Texas’ stubbornness: Bobby James Moore. It’s as clear as a red stop sign to Texas officials and everyone else in the country that individuals with intellectual disabilities may not be executed. But Texas insists that its decades-old method for testing a defendant’s mental capacity is sufficient, despite widespread improvements in medical evaluations that have been adopted across the U.S. When a judge ruled that a modern test had shown that Moore, who’s been awaiting execution since his 1980 conviction for murder, suffers from intellectual disability severe enough to keep him out of the death house, Texas appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. That court ruled the modern test invalid, arguing that only the outdated methods maintained by Texas officials could suffice. Lawyers for Moore have called that absurd; we agree. In seeking the Supreme Court review, they noted other state high courts have ruled that “current, established medical standards in assessing intellectual disability” should be used. Texas’ insistence that only its older testing methods are valid is unreasonable. It also marks the state out as a unnecessary holdout against capital punishment limits that have proven wise and human. Texas serves no higher public good by being so stubborn. The other case involves another inmate on Texas’ death row, though its challenge is not so pointedly directed at the death penalty. Instead, it asks a broader question: “Whether and to what extent the criminal justice system tolerates racial bias and discrimination.” When jurors were determining whether to sentence Duane Buck to death, his lawyers called an expert witness who, astoundingly, told jurors that Buck would be more likely to be dangerous in the future because he is black. That helped persuade the jury to sentence him to death. .......Both cases show the importance of Supreme Court scrutiny of the way Texas imposes the death penalty. The review is so critical because once imposed, an execution can never be undone. We can’t allow ourselves to forget how human, and therefore inescapably fallible, the process leading up to a death sentence is."
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