In the United States, IQ scores of “approximately 70” are generally considered to constitute a level of mental disability severe enough to preclude the death penalty—the idea being that the person in question’s mental level is too underdeveloped for execution to constitute a proper “punishment.”
Those guidelines are clearly not set in stone, because they were defied twice on Tuesday. In Georgia, a man named Robert Wayne Holsey, who has an IQ of 70, was executed after a court denied his appeal on the grounds of his mental ability (and also the fact that it turned out his lawyer had been drinking “a quart of vodka a day” during the trial.) Holsey was executed for killing a sheriff’s deputy named Will Robinson in 1995.
In Missouri, a man named Paul Goodwin with an IQ of about 73 was also executed. Goodwin beat a 63-year-old woman to death in 1993, and his execution marked Missouri’s 10th execution this year, tying it with Texas for the most in America …
