Texas executes intellectually disabled killer Robert Ladd

Texas has executed an intellectually disabled
prisoner despite a high court ban on putting
mentally impaired prisoners to death, the second
such violation of constitutional protections to
occur in the US this week.
Robert Ladd, 57, died by lethal injection on
Thursday evening. Under Texas’s unique – and
widely ridiculed – definition of intellectual
disability, he was deemed capable of being
executed because he did not match the degree of
mental impairment depicted in a character in a
John Steinbeck novel.
In his final statement Ladd addressed the sister of
his victim by name, telling her he was “really,
really sorry”.
“I really, really hope and pray you don’t have
hatred in your heart,” he said, adding that he
didn’t think she could have closure but hoped she
could find peace. “A revenge death won’t get you
anything,” he said.
Then Ladd told the warden: “Let’s ride.”
As the drug took effect he said: “Stings my arm,
man!” He began taking deep breaths, then started
snoring, the Associated Press reported. His snores
became breaths, each one becoming less
pronounced, before he stopped all movement.
He was pronounced dead at 7.02pm, 27 minutes
after the drug was administered.
The death of Ladd exposed a flaw in the normally
stringent safeguards imposed by the federal courts
on the death penalty states. Although the states
are generally allowed to set their own standards,
the US supreme court has ruled twice on the issue
of intellectual disability in order to set the
parameters of humane and civilised conduct.
In the rulings – in 2002 and last year – the high
court banned executions of people with “mental
retardation” on the grounds that they were a form
of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the
eighth amendment. It also said that the death
penalty states had to conform to standards set by
medical science and not impose their own arbitrary
definitions of mental disability.
Yet this week two prisoners who were categorically
found to be mentally impaired by numerous
medical experts have been put to death. The first
was in Georgia where Warren Hill, 54, was
judicially killed on Tuesday .
Texas put Ladd to sleep by lethal injection having
deemed him not to be sufficiently mentally
impaired according to its bizarre criterion for the
condition. Under what are known as “Briseno
factors”, the state sets out the profile of an
individual whom ordinary Texans would agree was
intellectually disabled. It points to Lennie Small,
the lumbering and childlike character in John
Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men,
identifying him as the legal yardstick.
Ladd’s lawyer, Brian Stull of the American Civil
Liberties Union, said that his client’s fate should
not have depended “on a novella. Instead of
sticking to the standards set by science, they refer
to a character in Of Mice and Men.”
Ladd was convicted of the 1996 murder of Vicki
Ann Garner in east Texas. Previously, he had
served 16 years of a 40-year prison sentence for
murdering another woman and setting her Dallas
apartment on fire, killing her two children.
Stull said that the two executions of mentally
impaired prisoners in one week proved that “we
are in the midst of a complete systems failure in
terms of honouring the constitutional protections
the supreme court ordered for intellectually
disabled people”.
On Wednesday, the supreme court ordered a stay
of execution in three pending cases in Oklahoma
as a result of the court’s earlier decision to
consider the use of the sedative midazolam in
lethal injections. Midazolam has been linked to a
spate of recent botched executions in Oklahoma,
Arizona, Florida and Ohio.
The review did not touch upon Texas’s procedures,
as the state has chosen to use pentobarbital, a
barbiturate it is believed to have acquired from a
relatively unregulated compounding pharmacy.