http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4657897.stm

"The life of a convicted murderer is hanging in the balance while a US jury considers whether his intelligence has increased enough to allow him to be put to death."

What does his IQ now have to do with anything? Surely his mental state at the time he committed the crime is all thats relevant.
Crazy! :eek:

Hmm . . . I think he's faking it. That [crime] doesn't seem like something an idiot could manage.

That or the test isn't a good judge of IQ, somehow. I wonder if it could have been rigged , or someone replaced his test with one that had his IQ just high enough to "pass"?

But the intellectual stimulation the killer got by constant contact with lawyers in the case is thought to have raised his IQ above the threshold of 70, which puts him in line for the death penalty in Virginia

Oh, that is just stupid. Are they really saying that talking with his lawyers raised his IQ enough to make that much of a differenece? Give me a break!

i don't think his intelligence increased.

I agree ....why woud his current intelligence matter. It should only matter what his intelligence was at the time of the crime?

It's like having a 12 year old kill someone and wait until he's an adult to charge him as an adult for murder .

Well anyway I won't bother saying my opinion on the whole death-penalty isue

another problem with the whole 11 appeals system

i think a more compelling version of this dillema appeared in the cases of death row inmates reforming into devout christians, muslims, etc.

Psychology tests used to evaluate a criminal's cognition typically include sophisticated traps to catch fakers.

Difficult questions that appear to be easy may be inserted to test whether people answer correctly because they feel they can allow themselves to get a simple answer right.

Other questions that look very different, but which are actually very similar, may be used to test consistency.


Oh, bull****. IQ tests are useless. I typically test very high but you all know I'm a moron.

There is no way for one human being to measure the intelligence of another. We are all too close in intelligence to each other. Estimate and give opinions about the intelligence of others: yes; measure intelligence: no -- there is no way.

Jobey What does his IQ now [emphais soilman's] have to do with anything?

Zzactly. Nothing. But you can't measure intelligence any way. The best that can happen is the jury can do its best to determine, by themselves hearing what happened and seeing the actions and hearing the words of the person on trial, whether he had enough understanding of things to know he was doing something wrong, or whether he was too stupid to know. If he knew, he is culpable, no matter what "iq tests" say. This is a job for direct interview by the jury; not a job for expert witnesses to tell the jury what the expert witnesses think. So called expert witnesses, to intelligence, are simply no more expert on the subject than the jury is.

But the intellectual stimulation the killer got by constant contact with lawyers in the case is thought to have raised his IQ above the threshold of 70, which puts him in line for the death penalty in Virginia

constant contact with lawyers only teaches someone how to be a crook and a scumbag. based on the hundreds of lawyers i have dealt with. they made me aggravated, not intellectually stimulated.

Haha, geez...I read the title as "Killers hate fangs....."