THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

In the Great State of Florida, when they aren't fighting tooth and nail to save the lives of fetuses, they are happily taking the lives of miscreants with their judicial system. Under Florida law, the state is constrained from taking the lives of the mentally disabled, which is determined to be anyone with an IQ under 70.

On Monday, the high court announced that it will hear Hall’s challenge to Florida’s rule that a convicted criminal must have a tested IQ of 69 or lower in order to be deemed intellectually disabled. This determination is a matter of life or death, as the Supreme Court has ruled previously that the intellectually disabled – formerly referred to as the mentally retarded – cannot face the death penalty.

“I’m very pleased they will be taking the case up,” Eric Pinkard, Hall’s Tampa-based appellate attorney, said in a telephone interview Monday. “The Florida definition leads to the possibility that the mentally retarded will be executed.”

Whitney Ray, the press secretary to Florida Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi, said in a statement that Florida courts had found that Hall “is not intellectually disabled. We will urge the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Hall’s sentence.”

Pinkard argues that Florida’s explicit definition, which allows the execution of someone with a tested IQ of 70 or above, fails to account for standard measurement error. The Supreme Court itself, in the 2002 decision protecting the intellectually disabled from execution, declared that an IQ between 70 and 75 is typically considered the cutoff score.

The sixteenth of 17 children, Hall was “tortured by his mother and abused by his neighbors,” according to a 1993 dissenting opinion in the Florida Supreme Court. He had an IQ of 60 and was “functionally illiterate and has the short-term memory of a first-grader,” the dissenting opinion observed. In later years, though, Hall’s IQ was variously measured at 71 and 73.

“Unfortunately,” Pinkard wrote in his petition to the high court, “the human race has not developed a test for mental retardation that is like a blood pressure machine, hooked up to a defendant’s arm with a (gauge) that reads ‘R’ for retarded or ‘N’ for not retarded.”

In this case, the test involved had an error range of +/-5 and other tests on Hall have varied results. While the test result is presented as a concrete number, the process is notoriously inaccurate and hardly a solid base upon which to take anyone's life. His lawyers are arguing that by the standards of the test itself, Hall could just as easily have an IQ of 66, well under the Florida limit and it would be wrong to execute someone based on a test that on any given day might have reprieved him. Which way will the Supremes decide?