Capping off a legal saga that included two U.S. Supreme Court remands and the wholesale rejection of Texas’s judiciary-created scheme for evaluating intellectual disability claims, the Texas high criminal court finally issued a decision that will take Bobby Moore off of death row. On November 6, 2019, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) acknowledged that “the Supreme Court has resolved [Moore’s] claim in his favor. There is nothing left for us to do but to implement the Supreme Court’s holding. Accordingly, we reform Applicant’s sentence of death to a sentence of life imprisonment.”
The TCCA order referred to the U.S. Supreme Court’s second remand of the case, a per curiam decision issued February 19, 2019, in which it definitively held, “Moore has shown he is a person with intellectual disability.” The Court had first remanded Mr. Moore’s claim in 2017, in a ruling overturning the TCCA precedent that had set out a number of non-clinical criteria for Atkins v. Virginia intellectual disability determinations. In that decision, the Court emphasized that, while states may choose their own standards for Atkins determinations, they cannot diverge from scientific knowledge, as criteria rooted in unscientific stereotypes creates an impermissible risk of executing someone with intellectual disability. Though the Harris County District Attorney had agreed that Mr. Moore is intellectually disabled, the TCCA on remand again denied relief. Granting review a second time, the U.S. Supreme Court noted the TCCA’s nominal application of its instructions. Chief Justice Roberts, who authored the dissent from the Court’s first Moore reversal, wrote separately in concurrence, “[I]t is easy to see that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals misapplied [Moore] here.”