Mother Jones
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Stanley Griffin was deemed intellectually disabled when he was 16. He scored an abysmal 65 on an IQ test, which put him among the lowest 1 percent of Americans in terms of his intellectual capacity. (An average score is 100.) He was spelling and doing math on a third-grade level. His school designated him mentally retarded and put him in special ed. He even competed in the Special Olympics.
As Griffin grew older, he had trouble finding and holding any job. It took him seven tries to finally pass the test required to drive a semi truck, and when no one would hire him even then, he resorted to manual labor. But his contractor brother wouldn’t let Griffin use power tools because he couldn’t manage them properly; Griffin was oblivious to danger, too, and would walk dangerously close to the backhoe. He tried, and failed, to master simple plumbing—even a Denny’s application proved overwhelming. His mental deficiencies left him unable to live alone, pay bills, or even purchase his own clothing because he would get so flummoxed by the math.
Somewhere along the way, Griffin began getting into trouble and having run-ins with the law. In 1990, at age 25, he was tried and convicted for burglary and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He served 12, but things only went downhill after his release. He ended up homeless, and finally, in 2012, Griffin was convicted of strangling to death 29-year-old Jennifer Hailey in College Station, Texas, and violently assaulting her 9-year-old son, who had witnessed her murder. He was tried and found guilty. The prosecutor asked for the death penalty and the jury obliged.
There is little question Griffin should have been locked away. At the same time, he should never have been a candidate for the death penalty. The Supreme Court has twice ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute people who are intellectually disabled—a polite alternative to “mentally retarded”—regardless of the nature of their crimes. Their “diminished capacities,” the court further noted, made such defendants far less likely to be deterred by the threat of death, which is one of the few remaining justifications for capital punishment.
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