Last week, a Texas criminal appeals court took a 64-year-old man off death row and resentenced him to life in prison without parole, after ruling that he was too intellectually disabled to be executed.
Randall Mays was sentenced to death in 2008 for the murder of two police officers in Henderson County, Texas. Since his sentencing, his lawyers have argued that Mays—who has schizophrenia and an IQ of 63—is too severely intellectually disabled to be executed. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that executing intellectually disabled inmates violates the Eighth Amendment.
