While Texas still has the death penalty, it's handed out less often, and today an interim legislative committee will be considering a rules changes that would make it even more rare, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
The House Criminal Jurisprudence committee will be specifically looking at the legal standards that are used to tell if a defendant is mentally ill or suffers from a developmental disorder.
"Over and over again, we see that the people who are actually be sentenced to death are disproportionally mentally ill," Robert Dunham with the Death Penalty Information Center tells Newsradio 1200 WOAI.
The state's standards, which include non-clinical factors, have long been under the microscope, but Dunham says the issue came to a head last year when the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to the case of Bobby Moore. He murdered James McCarble during a Houston grocery store robbery on April 25, 1980. Moore's lawyers argued that he was intellectually disabled, and criticized the state's seven-pronged, non-clinical test. The high court agreed, striking down the so-called "Briseno factors" and sent the case back for a new trial.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority. "The several factors Briseno set out as indicators of intellectual disability are an invention of the (Court of Criminal Appeals) untied to any acknowledged source, not aligned with the medical community's information, and drawing no strength from our precedent, the Briseno factors 'creat[e] an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed.' "
That sent shockwaves throughout the state system, with lawyers wondering if other cases might be in doubt as well.
One of the issues the committee will be looking at today is what instructions should be given to a jury. Dunham says the public needs to know their choices when called to issue a life or death verdict.
"In the most recent polls, two-thirds of Americans say that you should not apply the death penalty to people who are seriously mentally ill."