A federal appeals court has issued a last-minute stay of execution for a Texan man who was to become the first inmate put to death in the US since last month’s botched lethal injection attempt in Oklahoma.  Lawyers for Robert Campbell argued that he is intellectually disabled, meaning that executing him would be in breach of a US supreme court ruling in 2002 that putting to death the intellectually disabled is unconstitutional.  On Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours before his scheduled trip to the gurney, the fifth circuit court in New Orleans halted the 41-year-old’s execution to allow him to mount a fresh appeal on that basis, saying Texas officials gave one of Campbell’s previous attorneys “incorrect and incomplete information” about intelligence test scores.  Campbell was convicted of the 1991 murder in Houston of Alexandra Rendon, a 20-year-old bank employee, who was abducted, raped, robbed and shot.  But vital evidence that could have helped his claim of intellectual disability during various appeals was not made available by the Harris County district attorney’s office, the judges said in their ruling. The office had in 1991 subpoenaed Campbell’s school records, which showed evidence of very low intellectual ability.  In 2003, the year after the supreme court’s landmark decision, Campbell’s lawyer at the time requested test scores from the Texas department of criminal justice (TDCJ). In response, the department wrote that “inmates sentenced to death receive no intellectual testing upon incarceration” and claimed that Campbell scored 84 in an IQ test administered after a prior conviction, in effect putting him above the disability threshold of about 70.  In Tuesday’s ruling, the judges cast doubt on “whether such a test had been administered at all” and noted that in 1992, the year after the crime, a TDCJ division did in fact administer an intelligence test which indicated Campbell was intellectually disabled.  “Throughout this litigation in the state and federal courts regarding Campbell’s ability to assert an [intellectual disability] claim on the merits, the state never disclosed that it was in possession of three intelligence tests suggesting that Campbell was intellectually disabled,” they wrote.  In 2003, Texas asserted that there was no “credible evidence” of intellectual disability and opposed an attempt by Campbell’s lawyer to seek funds for fresh intelligence testing, though one of the tests in the district attorney’s possession showed a score of 68.  In making their decision, the judges cautioned that the evidence before them had not been subjected to "the rigors of the adversarial process and it may ultimately appear differently than it does now".  In court filings earlier this month, Texas officials disagreed with the assertion that Campbell is too intellectually disabled to be executed and questioned why it took so long for him to raise his latest claims.  In April this year a psychologist referred by Campbell's legal team diagnosed Campbell with "mild mental retardation", put his IQ at 69 and reported that he had trouble performing basic calculations. Earlier records suggested that Campbell had trouble reading the petrol gauge on his car and wore a watch but could not read it. However, Texas argued that other evidence suggested he was an "average child" who was even entrusted to babysit.  Court records suggest Campbell made no attempt to conceal the crime, which was committed with an accomplice – giving Rendon’s coat to his mother as a present, driving around in her car, wearing one of her rings on his little finger, and exclaiming “that’s the bitch we killed” in the presence of others when a story about Rendon’s disappearance aired on television news.  "It's a joke," Israel Santana, Rendon's cousin, told NBC News. "He's intelligent enough to commit a crime. He's intelligent enough to tell someone to run. He's intelligent enough to pull a trigger."  “Today the fifth circuit has ruled that Texas may not proceed with the scheduled execution of Robert Campbell, a man whose lifelong mental retardation was not proven until new evidence, long hidden by prosecutors and the Texas department of criminal justice, very recently came to light,” Robert Owen, Campbell’s current attorney, said in a statement.  “The fifth circuit’s decision today creates an opportunity for Texas to rise above its past mistakes and seek a resolution of this matter that will better serve the interests of all parties and the public. Mr Campbell has been fully evaluated by a highly qualified psychologist – a member of the Texas board of examiners of psychologists, appointed to that post by Governor Rick Perry – who confirms he is a person with mental retardation.  “Therefore, according to the US supreme court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v Virginia, he is ineligible for the death penalty. Given the state’s own role in creating the regrettable circumstances that led to the fifth circuit’s decision today, the time is right for the state of Texas to let go of its efforts to execute Mr Campbell, and resolve this case by reducing his sentence to life imprisonment. State officials should choose the path of resolution rather than pursuing months or years of further proceedings.”  Campbell’s legal team also attempted to stop the execution on the basis that Texas’s lack of transparency regarding its source of pentobarbital, the drug it uses in lethal injections, made it impossible to tell whether he might suffer a “cruel and unusual” death.  In court filings they cited events two weeks ago in Oklahoma, another state which has veiled its drug supplies in secrecy. Clayton Lockett writhed on the gurney before dying of an apparent heart attack.  Despite the widespread attention generated by Lockett’s death, the fifth circuit rejected the argument, saying that it was speculative and too similar to previous, unsuccessful, attempts to claim that Texas’s secrecy is unconstitutional.
Court of appeals gives Campbell's lawyers time to pursue case that he is mentally impaired and thus ineligible for execution