JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled 9-0 Thursday that a convicted murderer doesn’t have to be tested any further for intellectual disabilities and won’t be executed.
Justices told a trial judge to resentence Kevin Scott, convicted of a 1995 Bolivar County murder, to life in prison without parole. In doing so, they rejected an appeal from Attorney General Jim Hood. He wanted Scott to undergo further evaluation, arguing a psychologist didn’t administer tests to examine if Scott was faking his disability.
In 2002, after Scott was sentenced to death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing people with mental disabilities is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. Bolivar County Circuit Judge Johnnie Walls found in 2014 after hearing from experts on both sides that Scott was intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for execution.
Hood’s office had claimed that Walls relied too much on the defense’s proposed order, but Justice James Maxwell, writing for the court, said the state didn’t properly introduce that contention into evidence.
On the substance of the dispute, Maxwell wrote that Walls was faced with dueling experts who had different methods of evaluating Scott’s intelligence, and said it would be improper to second-guess his findings. A state expert testified that Scott was purposefully trying to score low. But Maxwell wrote that a defense psychologist presented enough evidence to show his method, administering separate IQ tests back-to-back, was a check on whether Scott was faking. Maxwell wrote defense testimony also lined up with results from IQ tests Scott took before the murder.
“Only when a trial judge’s finding on intellectual disability is ‘clearly erroneous’ may we disturb it,” Maxwell wrote. “But the mere likelihood we would not have bought a particular expert’s view or would have ruled differently than the trial judge does not amount to clear error.”
Scott was convicted of shooting and killing 74-year-old Richard Lee while he and another man were stealing Lee’s car from his carport at his home in Boyle, south of Cleveland. Scott confessed, but later recanted, claiming his companion was the killer. Lee’s wife said she saw Scott and he shot at her, and DNA and fingerprint evidence linked Scott to the crime.
Scott, now 39, remains imprisoned at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.
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