Marvin Wilson was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Jerry Williams
According to court documents Wilson believed he was arrested because Jerry Williams talked to the police about him. When Marvin got out of jail he would find Jerry Williams and murder him
Wilson would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Marvin Wilson would be executed on August 8 2012 by lethal injection
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When Was Marvin Wilson Executed
Marvin Wilson was executed on August 8 2012
Marvin Wilson Case
Marvin Wilson, a 54-year-old inmate whose attorneys insist his low IQ should have disqualified him from the death penalty, was executed last night. He was the seventh man to be taken to Texas’s death chamber this year.
Despite his lawyers’ petition that Wilson’s execution be stayed due to his mental capacity, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his appeal less than two hours before his 6 p.m. lethal injection.
Wilson’s case, in particular, caught the national media’s attention because of the extremely low IQ score—61—that Wilson earned on a 2004 test. The “minimum competency standard” is generally around a seventy IQ, which puts Wilson below the first percentile of intelligence and means he met the “standard clinical definition of mental retardation,” Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote at Salon. Wilson also sucked his thumb as an adult, didn’t know how to use a phone book or a ladder, and had trouble performing elementary tasks without aid. And the state of Texas never disputed Wilson’s low intelligence.
Wilson was a victim of the “savage arbitrariness of the death penalty as it is employed by the state of Texas. Poor, black, with the mental age of a six-year-old, he was sentenced to death for his ambiguous role in a drug-trade murder, when literally every day in America people are given far lighter sentences for more heinous crimes,” Campos opined.
But did his execution fly in the face of a 2002 Supreme Court decision that barred executing the mentally retarded? At the Nation, Liliana Segura said yes, dubbing Wilson’s case “a flagrant violation of the 2002 Supreme Court ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, which held that ‘the mentally retarded should be categorically excluded from execution,’ period.” Campos agreed with this sentiment.