Scotuscast

On November 29, 2016, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Moore v. Texas. In 1980, Bobby James Moore was convicted of capital murder for the shooting of James McCarble, a seventy-year-old store clerk, in Houston, Texas. Moore was convicted and received a death sentence, which was affirmed on appeal. After a federal court granted habeas corpus relief, a new punishment hearing occurred in 2001, and Moore was again sentenced to the death penalty. His sentence was again affirmed on appeal. Moore sought state habeas relief and argued that, under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia he was exempt from execution, because he was intellectually disabled. The state court granted habeas relief based on Moore’s Atkins argument, applying a definition of intellectual disability used by the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD). The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas reversed the grant, noting that the Texas legislature had not yet passed Atkins legislation