Death Penalty and Intellectual Disabilities Archives
Death Penalty and Intellectual Disabilities

05/27/2014: Supreme Court found Florida IQ cutoff for executions unconstitutional.

03/03/2014: Supreme Court heard oral arguments on death penalty for intellectually disabled.

05/02/2014: Obama expressed desire to ask AG Holder to investigate death penalty issues.

05/02/2014: UN urged death penalty moratorium in US.

11/02/2010: Georgia rejected clemency for death row inmate who claimed intellectual disability.

06/20/2002: Supreme Court held the execution of mentally retarded persons unconstitutional.

06/26/1989: Supreme Court found that execution of mentally retarded persons did not violate Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

07/02/1976: Plurality of Supreme Court lifted temporary moratorium on the application of the death penalty in the US.

THIS DAY @ LAW

Thomas Becket, former Chancellor of England, murdered by Henry II's knights

On December 29, 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket, former Chancellor of England, was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by knights acting in the name of Henry II.

Becket and Henry had been entangled in a power struggle over, among other things, criminal jurisdiction over clergy. Read a contemporary account of the murder of Thomas Becket.

Texas attains US statehood

On December 29, 1845, Texas became the twenty-eighth state to join the United States of America when US President James K. Polk signed the Ordinance of Annexation. Texas had a complicated path to statehood because it had formerly been part of Mexico and then an independent republic. The US Congress passed the Annexation of the Republic of Texas Joint Resolution on March 1, 1845. Voters in Texas then approved the Ordinance of Annexation in October, before it was approved by the US Congress and signed into law by President Polk on this day in 1845. The US Supreme Court later ruled in Texas v. White that, despite its unique path to statehood, Texas did not have the right to secede from the union.