Hearn v. Thaler, No. 11-70006 (5th Cir. 2012)
Annotate this CasePetitioner was found guilty of murder committed in the course of a kidnapping and robbery, and the state court sentenced him to death based on the jury's verdict on the two special issues at sentencing. At issue was whether the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) unreasonably applied federal law as established in Atkins v. Virginia when it refused to allow petitioner to wholly replace full-scale IQ scores with a clinical assessment to establish his claim of mental retardation. Considering that the Supreme Court had delegated to the states the responsibility of developing appropriate ways to enforce the constitutional restriction against executing mentally retarded defendants, the court could not second-guess the CCA's decision. Therefore, the court denied petitioner's application for a certificate of appealability because the CCA's decision was not an unreasonable application of federal law.
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