APA Joins Amicus Brief in Capital Case Before U.S. Supreme Court

APA joined four other mental health groups in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject criteria used by the state of Texas to determine that a defendant in a capital case is not intellectually disabled and therefore can be executed without violating the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

APA and the other mental health groups filed an amicus brief in support of Bobby James Moore, the petitioner in the case Moore v. Texas. They cited previous case law establishing that the diagnosis of intellectual disability in capital cases should be based on the diagnostic consensus of mental health professionals, including comprehensive assessment of intellectual and adaptive functioning using contemporary standards. They argued that the criteria used by Texas in assessing Moore for intellectual disability does not meet that standard and thereby endangers Moore, who might warrant exemption from execution if he were properly assessed.

The other groups are the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, and the National Association of Social Workers and its Texas chapter.

In an interview with Psychiatric News, past APA President Paul Appelbaum, M.D., a member of the Committee on Judicial Action and a corresponding member of the Council on Psychiatry and the Law, explained the case law preceding Moore v. Texas that is relevant in the amicus.

In a 2002 case before the Supreme Court (Atkins v. Virginia), the Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the execution of individuals with intellectual disability. “However, the Court declined to specify the criteria or procedures by which determinations of intellectual disability would be made [for the purposes of capital cases],” Appelbaum said. “So the question remained—how do we know when someone is intellectually disabled and therefore warrants an exemption from the death penalty? What process should states follow to make that determination? The lower courts and states have been trying to work out the answer to that question.”

A second case reaching the Supreme Court in 2004 (Hall v. Florida) established a precedent that became relevant to answering those questions, Appelbaum said.

“The issue in Hall was whether the state of Florida was justified in having a set of criteria for determining intellectual disability that differed from the consensus of relevant professional organizations,” he said. (Those relevant professional organizations included APA, which filed an amicus brief in that case as well.)

Appelbaum noted that there are two dominant sets of criteria for determining intellectual disability: the one appearing in DSM-5 and another formulated by the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disability (AAIDD). Both sets of criteria, which are similar, emphasize that a single score on an IQ test is not sufficient to assess intellectual disability; instead, a comprehensive assessment of intellectual and adaptive functioning using contemporary standards by a mental health professional is necessary.

In Hall v. Florida, the Court said Florida’s criteria—which relied on a single score on an IQ test—was not in accordance with the more comprehensive criteria of APA and the AAIDD and therefore failed to protect from execution individuals who might be intellectually disabled.

This became relevant in Moore, Appelbaum explained, because following the Court’s original ruling in Atkins, a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals adopted a set of nonclinical factors (called the “Briseno factors,” after the name of a defendant in a capital case) for determining intellectual disability that appear to be especially idiosyncratic.

According to the amicus brief, “The court … cited no mental health or medical authority as the basis for these factors, instead alluding to a fictional character [Lennie Small] in John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men as the basis for its reasoning about intellectual disability diagnosis.”

The amicus includes a detailed list of the ways in which the Briseno factors fall short of the accepted professional criteria and concludes: “[T]he so-called Briseno factors are incompatible with the consensus among the mental health professions and, when used, provide inaccurate and unreliable diagnoses of intellectual disability. The use of antiquated diagnostic criteria, refusal to interpret IQ scores using clinical standards, and the inclusion of nonclinical factors to diagnose intellectual disability all create significant risks that individuals with intellectual disability will be executed in violation of the Eighth Amendment.” ■

The amicus curiae brief can be accessed here.