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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Supreme Court May Overturn Strict IQ Standard for Capital Punishment

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Wednesday, March 19, 2014   

RALEIGH, N.C. - The way North Carolina evaluates the mental ability of people on death row could change depending on the outcome of a Florida case now in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of the 151 people on North Carolina's death row, some are diagnosed by medical professionals with mental retardation. But in this state, whether they can be executed often comes down to the results of an IQ test.

The Florida case - Freddie Lee Hall v. State of Florida (12-10882) - challenges that practice, said Elizabeth Hambourger, a staff attorney for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.

"You can't execute people who are mentally retarded," she said, "and that shouldn't depend on some sort of definition that's made up by lawmakers and that actually contradicts what clinicians and psychologists would find if they were to examine the person."

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people with mental disabilities cannot be executed.

Some states rely on a clinical evaluation of mental capacity. If North Carolina included such evaluations in its capital-crime rulings, some people would have their sentences converted to life in prison.

A judge found that North Carolina death row inmate Thomas Larry had what were termed "impairments in daily living." Larry was unable to document his mental history because the segregated school he attended lacked resources.

Hambourger explained what's at stake in the current Supreme Court case.

"If you are in the bottom two percentage of all people in the country in terms of your intellectual functioning," she said, "you can't be the worst of the worst, which is what the death penalty is supposed to be reserved for."

Larry's score of 74 was four points too high to meet the state's standard for mental retardation, although Hambourger said most mental-health professionals evaluate an IQ range, not a specific number. Results of another IQ test that also cited mental disability were not considered in court.



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