The US Supreme Court today overturned the death sentence of a Texas inmate said by his lawyers to be so mentally retarded he still believes in Santa Claus, ruling the jury instructions at re-sentencing were flawed.
By a 6-3 vote, the court ruled for Johnny Paul Penry, a convicted killer whose IQ is said by his lawyers to be between 50 and 63, below the 70 required for normal intelligence. They say he has the reasoning capacity of a 7-year-old.
The opinion by Ms Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the jury instruction was "ineffective and illogical" and did not allow jurors to consider mitigating evidence of Penry's mental retardation and childhood abuse.
The Supreme Court in 1989 threw out Penry's conviction and ordered a new trial on the grounds that juries in capital murder trials must be allowed to weigh evidence of mental retardation.
Penry then was retried, convicted and again sentenced to death in 1990 in the 1979 rape and murder of Pamela Carpenter, 22, in the east Texas town of Livingston.
O'Connor said the jury instructions at re-sentencing still did not comply with the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling.
She said the new instructions failed to provide the jury "with a vehicle for expressing its reasoned moral response to the mitigating evidence of Penry's mental retardation and childhood abuse."