It is unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded. So Marvin Wilson, a Texas inmate scheduled to be executed next Tuesday, should not constitutionally face the death penalty. As a court-appointed psychologist’s report details, Wilson is mentally retarded:

[Wilson] required repeated instruction for doing even simple things, such as cutting the grass. Mr. Kelly also noted that Marvin Wilson had significant reading problems. He had a difficult time keeping up when playing football. He could never understand how to run even simple plays. Mr. Kelly also noted that Mr. Wilson seemed to have a difficult time dressing himself properly. He could not color coordinate and sometimes wore mismatched socks. He. also would wear his belt so tightly that it would “almost cut of his circulation”. Frequently his shirt was buttoned incorrectly. Some of these problems continued even into adolescence. Mr. Kelly indicated that when Mr. Wilson was younger he tried to get some simple jobs involving things like sweeping the floors at a local store. However, he would lose the jobs quickly because he wasn’t “fast enough”. Mr. Kelly specifically recalled Mr. Wilson working at Wizard Car Wash. Even though he was assigned the simple duty of working at the drying station, he apparently was fired after a few days because of his inability to do the job. Mr. Kelly also noted that Mr. Wilson exhibited difficulty doing any kind of task that required logic or thinking. He never learned how to count money correctly until he was older. . . .

It is my opinion that the WAIS -III is the most valid indicator of adult intelligence now in current usage. On the WAIS-III Mr. Wilson earned a Verbal I.Q. of 61, a Performance I.Q. of 68, and the Full Scale I.Q. of 61. This places him within the mildly retarded range of intellectual ability and below the 1st percentile.

Texas hopes to exploit a potential loophole in the Supreme Court’s decision declaring executions of the mentally retarded unconstitutional in order to move forward with this execution. Although the Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia references the clinical definition of mental retardation — a person with an IQ of 70 or less who demonstrated “significantly subaverage intellectual functioning” before the age of 18 is generally considered mentally retarded — it also left “to the State[s] the task of developing appropriate ways to enforce the constitutional restriction upon [their] execution of sentences.” So Texas has designed its own, narrow definition of mental retardation that bears little resemblance to the one used by scientists and clinicians. A petition is currently pending in the Supreme Court seeking to close this loophole and save Wilson’s life.

This kind of zealous appetite for the death penalty is nothing new in Texas. One third of all modern U.S. executions take place in the Lone Star State.

On the Jane Velez Mitchell show Wednesday evening, Jonesboro Police Chief Michael Yates revealed more details about the ongoing investigation into the strange case of Chavis Carter, who allegedly shot himself in the temple while handcuffed in a police car. The chief, who said the situation was “bizarre” and “defies logic at first glance,” has reviewed the car’s dashboard camera and spoken to witnesses who say the officers were outside the car when Carter was shot:

YATES: There’s no indication of any projectiles coming from outside the vehicle. We’ve reviewed the dashcam video and as late as today managed to have some witnesses come forward that observed the incident from start to finish. And their statements tend to support that whatever transpired in the back of that police car transpired in the back with the officers in a different location.

In a private meeting with local black community leaders, Yates reportedly said the FBI is also involved in the investigation.

A vigil is planned for Carter on Monday night.

Watch it:

Catalist, a company that provides voting list data to progressive organizations, is among the closest observers of changes to voting rolls around the country. In analysis shared with ThinkProgress, the company observes that since November 2008, certain groups of living residents have been far more likely to be purged from the voting roles than others.

Their data suggests that beyond the wide variation in purge rates across states, there is significant variation within states:

In many states, certain parts of the state electorate, both geographically and demographically, are much more likely to be dropped off of the voter rolls than others. More specifically, some general trends that we see are focused on:
a. Urbanity – cities are getting disproportionately purged
b. Race – minorities are getting disproportionately purged
c. Marital Status – unmarried people are getting disproportionately purged
d. Age – younger (< 40 years old) and older (> 65 years old) voters are purged more frequently than middle-aged voters
e. County effects – there are big differences across county lines, pointing to sharp discontinuities based on arbitrary political boundaries that do not correspond with inherent behavioral differences

Catalist notes that more than 2.7 million living people who voted in 2008 have since been purged from the voter rolls. Among those, African American voters are “1.5 times more likely to be purged than Caucasian voters, nationally.”

These findings are consistent with what we have seen in Florida with Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) error-riddled purge attempts. A Miami Herald analysis showed that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters [were] the most likely to be targeted” by that effort.

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s efforts in the 1960s to ensure voting rights for all Americans, said last month that these purges of eligible voters from the rolls make him “want to just cry, after people gave a little blood, after some people were beaten, shot and murdered trying to help people become registered voters.” He lamented that “states throughout the nation come along with tactics to make it hard, to make it difficult for people to participate. We should be making it easy and simple and open up the political process and let all of the people come in.”

Instead, Scott and others are pushing efforts that may make it impossible for these millions of U.S. citizens to exercise their right to vote. These numbers show that regardless of whether the intent of these purges is discriminatory, their effect clearly is.

Pennsylvania has taken a strict approach to sentencing over the past several decades, resulting in a prison population that has swelled by 40 percent in the last dozen years, a corrections budget of over $1 billion, and over 20 penitentiaries currently over capacity.

However, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, the state has begun to shift away from over-incarceration and move toward reforms with an emphasis on rehabilitation programs for nonviolent offenders:

Emblematic of that philosophical shift, impelled in no small part by the parlous economy, is legislation signed last month by Gov. Corbett. The measures mandated by the Criminal Justice Reform Act are projected to lower Pennsylvania’s prison population by as many as 4,000 inmates over four years and to save up to $370 million in five years.

[...] William F. Plantier, Bucks County’s director of corrections…called the new law “an enlightened approach” to corrections and said he was buoyed by the effort to move away from the notion that more prisons were the only way to ensure public safety. The reality, Plantier said, is that “you just can’t keep on locking up everyone.”

Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) is just one of several conservative governors to take steps toward important — and fiscally responsible — prison reforms in their states. Most recently, Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) signed a bill to eliminate jail time and expand rehabilitation programs for nonviolent drug offenders, explaining that this type of prison reform is a more effective way to combat drug crime than the failed policies of the nation’s Drug War. John Kasich (R-OH) pushed a similar bill through his state legislature this May.

Considering the fact that the country’s broken criminal justice system contributes to wrongful deaths, potential psychological abuses, and incidents of sexual assault, these Republican governors are right to take steps toward reforms. States like Florida and New Hampshire, however, continue to advocate for disastrous policies to privatize their prison systems, a move that wouldn’t actually save any money and could actually increase the rate of incarceration.

In January of 2011, several senators attempted major reforms to the Senate rules intended to thwart the kind of obstructionism that has reigned in the Senate every since Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) took over as Minority Leader. This effort failed due to opposition from both Republicans and many senior Democrats. Filibuster reform’s opponents did, however, agree to pass a minor bill eliminating the requirement that certain military officers and low-level political appointees be confirmed by the Senate. That bill now passed both houses of Congress:

The House gave final congressional approval Tuesday to a bill that would save the slow-paced Senate some time by eliminating the need for confirming nominees to some 170 executive branch jobs and 3,000 military officer positions. . . . Among positions that will no longer need Senate approval are a chief scientist in the Commerce Department, directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the top press spokesmen for the Defense, Treasury and State departments, members of the Council of Economic Advisers, the commissioner of education statistics, the Homeland Security Department’s chief medical officer, director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau and members of the Mississippi River Commission.

Although this bill is a positive development, its impact will be limited. It does nothing to prevent a minority of the Senate from attempting to shut down entire agencies by filibustering essential personnel. It does nothing to prevent widespread obstruction of judicial nominees. And it does nothing to prevent the minority choking the federal government by making it impossible for the Senate to confirm more than a small fraction of a president’s nominees.

As a 2010 Center for American Progress report explains, Senate rules allow a small minority of the Senate to waste up to 30 hours of floor time before a single nominee can be confirmed. When these 30 hours are multiplied across the all Senate-confirmed political appointees a president needs to fill, it adds up to more time than any president is allowed to stay in office:

After the bill that just passed the House becomes law, obstructionist senators will still have the power to force the majority to waste more than 1,000 days Senate work days before a president’s entire slate of nominees can be confirmed.

There is some reason to be optimistic that more meaningful filibuster reform could occur next year, however. Every two years, when newly elected senators are sworn in, a brief window opens up allowing the Senate to change its rules by a simple majority vote, rather than the 67 vote supermajority the Senate’s rules normally require. Although Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) opposed serious reform efforts the last time this window opened, he has since recanted. Last May, Reid delivered a floor speech where he agreed that the senators who supported significant rules reform “were right. The rest of us were wrong.”

In 2010, anti-gay groups spent nearly $800,000 to remove three state supreme court justices who joined the court’s unanimous decision holding that marriage equality is required by the Iowa constitution. Yesterday, Iowa Republican Party chair A.J. Spiker released a statement calling for a fourth justice, Justice David Wiggins, to be removed in November, effectively throwing the GOP’s support behind an effort to retaliate against judges who believe that constitutional guarantees of equality should actually be enforced. According to Spiker’s statement:

In 2010 Iowa voters chose to dismiss three activist judges who allowed their own politics to influence their obligation to uphold the Iowa Constitution. These three were among a handful of judges who chose to disregard years of legal precedent on the status of marriage and how it was to be defined.

Instead of allowing the people of Iowa to decide this issue at the polls, these judges instead chose to impose their will upon the state and re-write history without weighing the merits of our laws and values. Regardless of political pressure or the state of cultural affairs at the moment, it is the people of Iowa through our elections that must be permitted to decide this important issue.

Just as Iowans successfully showed in 2010, it is again time to put a check on this power and reign in an activist judge from his position of misused authority.

Spiker, of course, slammed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, despite nearly 200 years of precedent establishing that health reform is constitutional. So when he claims to oppose “activist judges,” what he really means is that all judges should be required to do what he wants them to do.