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" I know I&amp;#039;m supposed to be outraged that Texas executed a guy with an IQ well below optimal room temperature. I know I&amp;#039;m supposed to be outraged that the Supreme Court Of The United States took about eleven seconds out of its busy workday to decide that Texas could kill this guy despite the fact that one of its own precedents would seem to mitigate against it.... The Supreme Court issued a 2002 ruling outlawing the execution of the mentally impaired, but left it to states to determine what constitutes mental impairment. Kovarsky argued that Texas was trying to skirt the ban by altering the generally accepted definitions of mental impairment to the point where gaining relief for an inmate is &amp;quot;virtually unobtainable.&amp;quot; This is because Texas wants to kill people. The governor of Texas, the goodhearted Goodhair with Christ in his heart, likes killing people. (One of the few actual ovations he got during his misbegotten presidential run was when he mentioned how many people he&amp;#039;d killed.) Killing people is very good politics. And, frankly, I agree with Goodhair on this. If you want to have a death penalty, and if you believe in all the barbaric arguments on its behalf, then you simply cannot care whether or not you execute the odd retarded person or two. The most singularly clumsy moral contortions we have in this country take place over the issue of whether you can wedge a death penalty into the system of laws that this country claims to have. You simply cannot do that. A system based on serious due process and on the primacy of the rights of the accused simply does not have the ethical space for a death penalty to inhabit. The death penalty is an act of emotion, of vengeance, now and always. Once you let those factors into your legal system, the &amp;quot;softer&amp;quot; elements of that system cannot prevail. The death penalty itself will not permit it. What remains is that which ultimately came to disgust former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who announced late in his tenure that he would no longer &amp;quot;tinker with the machinery of death.&amp;quot; Admit a death penalty to this system of justice, and that is all that is left to you. You can&amp;#039;t have a death penalty and not use it. You can&amp;#039;t have a death penalty and use it sparingly, or judiciously, or in any way fairly. Politics will prevent you from doing any of that. If you are a governor who tries to use the death penalty sparingly, you will lose your next primary to someone who will use it promiscuously. If you are a local DA who asks for the death penalty judiciously, you will lose the next election to somebody who will run people through the death chamber like cars through the EZ Pass lane. We must conclude that we want the death penalty because we still decline to elect enough people committed to getting rid of it. All that being said, why wouldn&amp;#039;t you execute Marvin Wilson? What&amp;#039;s the point in quibbling over the metrics of precisely how handicapped he is? He killed a guy, didn&amp;#039;t he? Now it&amp;#039;s our turn. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15198/texas-death-penalty-iq-11481366/?hootPostID=dd3e4279ab19ac13063c931db7a05a0f>