Image Courtesy: Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Shawn Maxam on the execution of Marvin Wilson.
Tonight, Texas aka America’s Death Penalty capital executed Marvin Wilson who reportedly had an I.Q. of 61. Initially there was a belief that the Supreme Court would intervene but that didn’t happen. Honestly why would it? When has the criminal justice system been kind to racial minorities or any group that is deemed inferior, abnormal or on the fringes of mainstream society.
Lee Kovarsky who was Marvin Wilson’s attorney released the following statement below. You can read about the case at The Nation.
We are gravely disappointed and profoundly saddened that the United States Supreme Court has refused to intervene to prevent tonight’s scheduled execution of Marvin Wilson, who has an I.Q. of 61, placing him below the first percentile of human intelligence. Ten years ago, this Court categorically barred states from executing people with mental retardation. Yet, tonight Texas will end the life of a man who was diagnosed with mental retardation by a court-appointed, board certified specialist.
It is outrageous that the state of Texas continues to utilize unscientific guidelines, called the Briseño factors, to determine which citizens with intellectual disability are exempt from execution. The Briseño factors are not scientific tools, they are the decayed remainder of an uninformed stereotype that has been widely discredited by the nation’s leading groups on intellectual disability, including the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. That neither the courts nor state officials have stopped this execution is not only a shocking failure of a once-promising constitutional commitment, it is also a reminder that, as a society, we haven’t come quite that far in understanding how so many of those around us live with intellectual disabilities.
This case is sad on multiple levels. Every single day there is a media story about a man of color losing his life. Next time you think about why Black men are “so angry” in this country it is because we are constantly afraid. We never feel safe. Not from each other, not from the law, not from government institutions, not in this country we love and call home.
Please share this with friends, enemies and temporary allies alike.
Thank you so much for reading, sharing and commenting!
R.I.P. SKH
About S. Maxam
Thanks for posting this Shawn, I’ll have a read up on it.
I think the very fact that his own defence were using standards as subjective and flawed as IQ to argue his case, shows how underdeveloped senisitivty to vulnerable adults is within this system.
He killed somebody, right ? So he wasn’t a kid who stole somebody’s candy.
Needless to say I am anti-capital punishment and this is yet another reason why I remain so.
The reality is that the prisons are loaded with minority males (and some non-minority as well) who have mental health issues that weren’t addressed or taken into consideration when sentenced. Goes back to the fact that men are disposable. Put them in jail and throw away the key.
When we get clients on the unit who have such low scores, their treatment plan is adjusted so as to accommodate where they are mentally. They absorb and process information differently. Of course the difference is that our goal is success whereas the prison system is just interested in housing and forget who these men are.
Something that just came to mind …. How would people feel if a 7 year old child was prosecuted and charged as an adult for something like murder. Then given the same sentence? Truth is that a seven year old doesn’t have the mental development that an “adult” has. Yet we imprison and as in this case, execute men who have similar mental health restrictions.
@WIrbelwind … we’re talking about putting this man to death.
Is this about race? or is it about Texas’s love affair with premeditated murder, which we’ve all known about for a long time?
Both
That is just barbaric.There might be situations where the death penalty is unavoidable (usually, if someone represents an ongoing threat to the lives of others, even after being incarcerated), but this isn’t one of them. Nobody needed to kill this guy. They wanted to kill this guy.
This makes me think of the people I see when I walk around my city. There is one guy in particular that demonstrates what I believe is a major shortfall in our society: how we deal with mental illness, drug addiction, and disability.
This man is black, in his late 40s or 50′s and is very obviously mentally ill. He wears multiple layers of clothing including hats, gloves, parkas, scarves and pants all year round, even in the peak of summer where it is routinely 90 plus degrees. He obviously defecates in his clothing as one can smell him from a block away, and he sits idly smoking a cigarette with a vacant look as his life ticks off another day of a miserable existence until he dies. I can’t help but to think how he got to this point. It could be all his fault, maybe he’s refused help, maybe he resisted and fled. But I think more than likely he simply couldn’t afford to get it, or somewhere along the line some person made a decision to refuse him the help he requires and that essentially amounted to a death sentence for the guy. I see all kinds of people like that and I don’t think it is necessarily a race issue, because many of the individuals I see are white. I believe it is a failure of our culture to identify that there are some among us who are weak, ill and stricken with life altering ailments, and these people deserve our collective sympathy and effort towards improving their chances at living happily.