At the time of the 2002 Supreme Court decision, 18 states had recently ended the death penalty for intellectually disabled defendants, joining a dozen that had previously done so or had abolished the death penalty entirely. “I dissented in the ways we allowed for picking juries and on the permissible scope of evidence allowed in a death penalty hearing. I became increasingly disenchanted with the operation of the death penalty. In the end, the three justices joined together in an opinion, Jurek v. Texas, upholding the Texas death penalty. In Texas, the path to the death penalty did not narrow, as he had hoped.

Source: New York Times July 17, 2019 21:11 UTC