Court Delays a 2nd Execution in Texas

A federal court halted a Texas execution Wednesday, the second time in eight days that questions about an inmate’s mental retardation temporarily spared him from the United States’ busiest death chamber.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans granted Robert Charles Ladd a stay about nine hours before he was due to be put to death by lethal injection.

The court returned the case to a lower federal court to review evidence that Ladd, 46, had been diagnosed as mentally retarded during his childhood.

Last week, the 5th Circuit granted Kenneth Wayne Morris, 32, a stay for similar reasons, about two hours before he was due to die by lethal injection for a 1991 burglary and murder in Houston.

Both decisions from the 5th Circuit, widely considered among the most conservative federal courts in the country and the least likely to overturn a conviction, incorporated a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year barring the execution of the mentally retarded.

Ladd, convicted of raping and murdering a 38-year-old woman who was beaten to death with a hammer in 1996, would have been the 14th inmate to be executed this year in Texas. The state on Tuesday executed Juan Rodriguez Chavez, 34, making him the 302nd inmate put to death in Texas since it resumed capital punishment in 1982.

The court noted that it had reviewed and rejected Ladd’s claims of mental retardation in his prior appeal, but it said that Ladd had only raised the issue as part of another argument. He originally had argued that his conviction should be overturned because his trial lawyer failed to bring his intelligence up as a defense.

Since Ladd has now raised evidence of retardation as a separate issue, the appellate court said the recent Supreme Court ban required it to send the case back for new review.

It cited a childhood report showing that Ladd’s IQ was under the mental retardation threshold of 70 points, and reports that he functioned on a second-grade level at age 12.

The stays for both Ladd and Morris will remain in effect until the lower courts issue rulings, after which the inmates can appeal their cases again if they lose.