Joy
11-02-2003, 04:12 PM
I have read this article, of which will follow this question, about how since mental retardation has come up in the death penalty. Mentioned here is ORGANIC BRAIN SYNDROME . Does anyone know about this and is it a form of mental retardation or not. Any help would be appreciated.
Joy
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My Groups | TX-DeathPenalty-Info Main Page
October 19, 2003
Capital cases challenge psychologists
Ban on executing mentally retarded fuels scrutiny of evaluations
By KAREN PATTERSON, The Dallas Morning News
A U.S. Supreme Court decision about the death penalty is reverberating not
only in legal circles, but at psychological conferences.
The 2002 decision, known as Atkins vs. Virginia, seems clear: Executing
people who are mentally retarded, the court ruled, violates the
constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Deciding which murder defendants have mental retardation, however, is a
muddy business, forensic experts said last week at a professional
conference in Dallas.
Psychologists will be pressed to give juries black-and-white answers about
a gray area – to somehow draw a line between mild mental retardation and
only slightly better, or "borderline," intellectual functioning, said
Dallas-area neuropsychologist J. Randall Price.
"These are not easy evaluations ... with such an important outcome," he
said at the National Academy of Neuropsychology's annual meeting, which
drew more than 1,000 attendees to downtown.
Controversy surrounding IQ scores, for instance, makes it vital that
neuropsychologists be tapped to more thoroughly evaluate defendants, Dr.
Price said. "It's amazing what the courts and the law are going to end up
doing to mental retardation," he said.
Ultimately, the fallout from the Atkins decision may extend to other
mental impairments, and may even call capital punishment itself into
question, said Kay Stevens, an associate professor of education at Texas
Christian University.
The high court's description of retardation states that a person must have
deficient intellectual functioning and significant impairment in everyday
life skills, and the condition must have been identified before age 18.
Limitations a mentally retarded person would have, the court said, include
problems processing information, communicating, thinking abstractly,
reasoning and controlling impulses.
But these limitations aren't restricted to the mentally retarded. "Are
there other categories of individuals you evaluate who have the same
limitations?" Dr. Price asked fellow psychologists.
Impulse control can also be a problem among people with
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Dr. Stevens noted. "Will the
Atkins decision go to other disabilities, because we can probably build
really good cases," she asked, "or will the Atkins decision do away with
the death penalty altogether?"
One disability that might ultimately be affected is neuropsychological
impairment – a broad category that includes mental retardation but also
impairment from brain injury.
The list of death penalty exemptions has been broadening, from the
insanity defense to the recent ruling on the mentally retarded – and it
may someday encompass other groups, such as juveniles and those impaired
by brain injury, said Barbara Lane Hart, an associate professor of
criminal justice at the University of Texas at Tyler.
"It raises the question, then, where will the neuropsychologically
impaired fall?" said Dr. Hart.
Along with psychologists Robert Geffner and Elizabeth Lim, Dr. Hart has
compared neuropsychological functioning of death penalty offenders to
people outside the criminal justice system who had either been exposed to
a toxic substance or had suffered a so-called closed head injury, like a
concussion. Depending on what measures were used, at least one-quarter,
and up to two-thirds, of the 33 death penalty offenders showed signs of
neuropsychological impairment, said Dr. Lim, of Eastern Correctional
Institution in Westover, Md.
Yet data on the 33 offenders indicated that perhaps only one would qualify
as mentally retarded based on intelligence testing, or IQ, scores alone,
said Dr. Geffner, founder and president of the Family Violence & Sexual
Assault Institute. A person could have a pretty severe neuropsychological
impairment – from a car accident or fall, say – and still score above the
cutoff for retardation. "We need to look at brain impairment and not just
mental retardation," he said.
Even in looking just at mental retardation, intelligence testing is
problematic. Traditionally, people with an IQ score below 70 – about 2.3
percent of the population – are considered mentally retarded, Dr. Price
said. But now, to account for measurement error, a cutoff of 70 to 75 is
often used – a range that means twice as many people could be considered
retarded.
IQ scores are in fact a moving target, noted a study released Sunday in
the October issue of American Psychologist. IQ tests are periodically
"renormed" – in essence, made harder, in order to compensate for the
steady rise in scores that has occurred over the past century. But this
influences who is diagnosed with mild mental retardation – and who is not
– for several years after the test is adjusted, scientists from Cornell
and West Virginia universities reported.
The scientists used IQ data from nine school districts, and almost 9,000
special education assessments, in the study. Ultimately, students who
didn't meet the cutoff for retardation on an older, easier test would now
qualify for special education services, the study noted.
"Our results imply that the year that a capital murder defendant was
tested can determine whether she or he is sentenced to die as opposed to
life imprisonment," the scientists wrote. "This raises concerns regarding
inmates on death row who tested above the 70-75 IQ cutoff on a test that
was near the end of its norming cycle," when scores are highly inflated,
as well as an inmate who tested in the mental retardation range during the
earliest years of a new norm, when the test is hardest.
Such research highlights a new, and unsettling, nexus between the
schoolhouse and death row. When special educators evaluate children and
design education plans for the mentally retarded, they aren't thinking
about capital punishment ramifications, Dr. Stevens said.
But whether a person once qualified for special education bears directly
on death penalty cases, because of the provision that mental retardation
had to be identified before age 18. "What we do to help children ... is
now being used for different reasons," Dr. Stevens said.
Yet, when recently reviewing the literature in special education journals,
Dr. Stevens said she didn't find a single article addressing the topic.
Trends among special educators may also influence courts' life-and-death
decisions, she noted. For instance, schools are designating far fewer
students as mentally retarded, while diagnosis of "learning disabilities"
over recent decades has doubled, she said.
Worried about lawsuits or stigma, "we just don't like to say students with
mild mental retardation are mentally retarded," she said. Among
professional groups, the term mental retardation is dying out, while
developmental disabilities is gaining ground.
"I wonder what that's going to do to the Atkins decision," Dr. Stevens
said.
-----
Source : Dallas Morning News
Joy
ADVERTISEMENT
My Groups | TX-DeathPenalty-Info Main Page
October 19, 2003
Capital cases challenge psychologists
Ban on executing mentally retarded fuels scrutiny of evaluations
By KAREN PATTERSON, The Dallas Morning News
A U.S. Supreme Court decision about the death penalty is reverberating not
only in legal circles, but at psychological conferences.
The 2002 decision, known as Atkins vs. Virginia, seems clear: Executing
people who are mentally retarded, the court ruled, violates the
constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Deciding which murder defendants have mental retardation, however, is a
muddy business, forensic experts said last week at a professional
conference in Dallas.
Psychologists will be pressed to give juries black-and-white answers about
a gray area – to somehow draw a line between mild mental retardation and
only slightly better, or "borderline," intellectual functioning, said
Dallas-area neuropsychologist J. Randall Price.
"These are not easy evaluations ... with such an important outcome," he
said at the National Academy of Neuropsychology's annual meeting, which
drew more than 1,000 attendees to downtown.
Controversy surrounding IQ scores, for instance, makes it vital that
neuropsychologists be tapped to more thoroughly evaluate defendants, Dr.
Price said. "It's amazing what the courts and the law are going to end up
doing to mental retardation," he said.
Ultimately, the fallout from the Atkins decision may extend to other
mental impairments, and may even call capital punishment itself into
question, said Kay Stevens, an associate professor of education at Texas
Christian University.
The high court's description of retardation states that a person must have
deficient intellectual functioning and significant impairment in everyday
life skills, and the condition must have been identified before age 18.
Limitations a mentally retarded person would have, the court said, include
problems processing information, communicating, thinking abstractly,
reasoning and controlling impulses.
But these limitations aren't restricted to the mentally retarded. "Are
there other categories of individuals you evaluate who have the same
limitations?" Dr. Price asked fellow psychologists.
Impulse control can also be a problem among people with
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Dr. Stevens noted. "Will the
Atkins decision go to other disabilities, because we can probably build
really good cases," she asked, "or will the Atkins decision do away with
the death penalty altogether?"
One disability that might ultimately be affected is neuropsychological
impairment – a broad category that includes mental retardation but also
impairment from brain injury.
The list of death penalty exemptions has been broadening, from the
insanity defense to the recent ruling on the mentally retarded – and it
may someday encompass other groups, such as juveniles and those impaired
by brain injury, said Barbara Lane Hart, an associate professor of
criminal justice at the University of Texas at Tyler.
"It raises the question, then, where will the neuropsychologically
impaired fall?" said Dr. Hart.
Along with psychologists Robert Geffner and Elizabeth Lim, Dr. Hart has
compared neuropsychological functioning of death penalty offenders to
people outside the criminal justice system who had either been exposed to
a toxic substance or had suffered a so-called closed head injury, like a
concussion. Depending on what measures were used, at least one-quarter,
and up to two-thirds, of the 33 death penalty offenders showed signs of
neuropsychological impairment, said Dr. Lim, of Eastern Correctional
Institution in Westover, Md.
Yet data on the 33 offenders indicated that perhaps only one would qualify
as mentally retarded based on intelligence testing, or IQ, scores alone,
said Dr. Geffner, founder and president of the Family Violence & Sexual
Assault Institute. A person could have a pretty severe neuropsychological
impairment – from a car accident or fall, say – and still score above the
cutoff for retardation. "We need to look at brain impairment and not just
mental retardation," he said.
Even in looking just at mental retardation, intelligence testing is
problematic. Traditionally, people with an IQ score below 70 – about 2.3
percent of the population – are considered mentally retarded, Dr. Price
said. But now, to account for measurement error, a cutoff of 70 to 75 is
often used – a range that means twice as many people could be considered
retarded.
IQ scores are in fact a moving target, noted a study released Sunday in
the October issue of American Psychologist. IQ tests are periodically
"renormed" – in essence, made harder, in order to compensate for the
steady rise in scores that has occurred over the past century. But this
influences who is diagnosed with mild mental retardation – and who is not
– for several years after the test is adjusted, scientists from Cornell
and West Virginia universities reported.
The scientists used IQ data from nine school districts, and almost 9,000
special education assessments, in the study. Ultimately, students who
didn't meet the cutoff for retardation on an older, easier test would now
qualify for special education services, the study noted.
"Our results imply that the year that a capital murder defendant was
tested can determine whether she or he is sentenced to die as opposed to
life imprisonment," the scientists wrote. "This raises concerns regarding
inmates on death row who tested above the 70-75 IQ cutoff on a test that
was near the end of its norming cycle," when scores are highly inflated,
as well as an inmate who tested in the mental retardation range during the
earliest years of a new norm, when the test is hardest.
Such research highlights a new, and unsettling, nexus between the
schoolhouse and death row. When special educators evaluate children and
design education plans for the mentally retarded, they aren't thinking
about capital punishment ramifications, Dr. Stevens said.
But whether a person once qualified for special education bears directly
on death penalty cases, because of the provision that mental retardation
had to be identified before age 18. "What we do to help children ... is
now being used for different reasons," Dr. Stevens said.
Yet, when recently reviewing the literature in special education journals,
Dr. Stevens said she didn't find a single article addressing the topic.
Trends among special educators may also influence courts' life-and-death
decisions, she noted. For instance, schools are designating far fewer
students as mentally retarded, while diagnosis of "learning disabilities"
over recent decades has doubled, she said.
Worried about lawsuits or stigma, "we just don't like to say students with
mild mental retardation are mentally retarded," she said. Among
professional groups, the term mental retardation is dying out, while
developmental disabilities is gaining ground.
"I wonder what that's going to do to the Atkins decision," Dr. Stevens
said.
-----
Source : Dallas Morning News