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Perhaps all of those people are making claims but there was a man executed in Texas a couple of weeks ago that had an attorney who made the claim that his client had the "mind of a child" at the time of his crime since he was not 18 at the time. He tried to get a stay of execution until this ruling was finalized.

The man was 17 1/2 when he committed the murder/carjacking/attempted murder crime (he killed the driver, shot but did not kill the passenger, and stole the car). How much "smarter" was this thug going to get in 6 months? We were told how he was elected class president, how he was a star athlete.

This is just another trick in the bag for lawyers to keep the guilty from getting their due (not a saving by grace, but a loophole).

There have been other unusual cases like a man who was fine when he committed the murders but sustained some kind of head injury later (possibly a self-inflicted gunshot from an attempted suicide). Some claimed that it wasn't right to kill him since he had no idea what was happening to him or why.

I heard that this ruling is bad also because it purposely left the determination of mental ability/retardation to each state meaning that they won't have a common definition.