Adkins v. Virginia the SCOTUS held that it was unconstitutional to execute someone with an intellectual disability.Many people are against the death penalty. As we learned from our discussion of A Just Mercy, the death penalty is a sanitized lynching. With the Adkins decision, we started to get some safeguards to rollback the number of executions in our country. Yet, I need to repeat this one more time: the death penalty is a state-sponsored lynching. I need you to center what I just said about the death penalty.
Adkins was now the law of the land. However, this is America. Accordingly, white prosecutors embarked on a righteous crusade to prove to the world that IQ tests are racist. In fact, these white prosecutors would argue to the court that IQ test are so racially biased that the Judge must add between five and fifteen points to each black person’s IQ score.
These white prosecutors were successful. In many states, judges now add between 5 and 15 points to the IQ test score of black people, so we can “justly” execute them. Let me repeat this: white prosecutors have spent millions of dollars to establish the racial bias of IQ tests, only so they can kill black people.
They have not spent a dime to advocate that points need to be added to black LSAT, MCAT, GRE, SAT, ACT, etc. scores. These points only need to be added to IQ scores, so they can be raised to a level where we can execute these black people, and not run afoul of Adkins.
The death penalty is a sanitized lynching.
Illinois v. Wardlow: the SCOTUS found that in certain neighborhoods, fleeing from the police is sufficient to establish reasonable suspicion for the officer to legally detain the person(s).
Justice Rehnquist wrote that Mr. Wardlow “looked in the direction of the officers and fled.” It was reasoned because this encounter occurred in a high-crime neighborhood, even though the police had no reason to suspect that Mr. Wardlow had committed a crime, it was still reasonable for him to be stopped because he attempted to flee.
On the other hand, if this same situation had occurred in an affluent area aka “low-crime area”, this would have been an unconstitutional stop. SCOTUS has concluded that policing in “high-crime” areas can be more aggressive than policing in “low-crime” areas. We know from our discussions on Homeward and the Color of Law, that ghettos tend to be violent places that have few opportunities and high amounts of poverty. A Just Mercy instructs us that the opposite of poverty is justice. The Wardlow decision confirms that there is no justice in the ghetto.