Friday, January 15, 2010

Why won’t Texas just get on with it and secede from the Union? Despite the fact it is unconstitutional to execute mentally retarded prisoners in the United States, Texas has found a loophole to the law, according to a published report.

According to a new report in The Texas Observer, psychologist George Denkowski, an expert witness often used by Texas prosecutors, practices a form of “junk science” to erroneously boost the intelligence evaluation scores of mentally deficient death row prisoners,

In a 2002 Supreme Court decision, Atkins v. Virginia, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “Because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses … [the mentally retarded] do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct.”

Because of this, the justices found it “cruel and unusual” to put the metally deficient to death, leaving it to the states to establish a framework by which such individuals could be identified in capital cases.

However, Texas Gov. Rick Perry rejected a bill that would have established rules to determine who is mentally retarded. Left grasping, courts invented their own criteria, turning to psychologists for the complicated evaluations.

Having played a key part in two-thirds of the state’s Atkins appeals, Dr. George Denkowski has built a lucrative practice off ensuring the mentally retarded are executed, his critics say. Denkowski’s reputation for declaring prisoners fit to die has earned him “almost Dr. Death status,” attorney Robert Morrow told reporter Reneé Feltz.

For $180 an hour, the 30-year veteran psychologist would evaluate a prisoner’s mental standing. For an additional $250 an hour, he would testify. And Denkowski almost always worked for the prosecution, the Observer noted.

After his evaluation of mentally retarded prisoner Daniel Plata was thrown out by a Texas judge, who called Denkowski’s methods “fatally flawed,” his critics became emboldened. Dr. Jerome Brown, who had worked on several of Denkowski’s cases in the past, filed a complaint with the state licensing board for psychologists, charging that Denkowski was unethically altering testing methodologies to drive adaptive behavior scores higher.

“It’s essentially junk science,” Brown argued.