SC rules to exempt intellectually disabled from capital punishment

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday for a second time ruled in favour of a black death row inmate from Texas whose lawyers have said is intellectually disabled and therefore exempt from capital punishment.

The high court ruled 6-3 that a Texas appeals court in June 2018 did not consider the case in the correct manner when the matter returned to it following the justices' first intervention in 2017. Bobby Moore, 59, was convicted at age 20 of fatally shooting an elderly grocery store clerk during a 1980 robbery in Houston. He won his previous case at the high court in 2017 when the justices ruled 5-3 that he should get another chance to show evidence of his disability.

The unsigned ruling said that the Texas court's ruling that left the death sentence intact "rests upon analysis too much of which too closely resembles what we previously found improper."