Summary
U. S. Supreme Court case U.—S. Supreme Court case to review a Texas murderer’s claim that he is too mentally retarded to be eligible for the death penalty. Bobby James Moore was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1980 shotgun murder of 78-year-old James McCarble during the robbery of a grocery store in Houston. Eyewitnesses testified to seeing Moore shoot the elderly man in the head even though he had his hands up. After more than three decades of failed appeals, Moore now claims that the state’s rules governing the evaluation of mental disability in death penalty cases are unconstitutional, and should comply with the ever-changing standards announced by private associations. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear Moore’s claim, CJLF joined the case to argue that allowing private organizations with political agendas to control how states determine if murderers are mentally retarded would throw every state’s process for determining a defendant’s mental competence into turmoil and invite endless litigation over the sentencing of guilty and fully competent murderers such as Moore. The Court ruled that the standard used by Texas was inappropriate and reversed, but it did not go so far as to mandate use of privately determined standards.
