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Your Corrupt Ways Had Finally Made You Blind: Prosecutorial Misconduct And The Use Of Ethnic Adjustments In Death Penalty Cases Of Defendants With Intellectual Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

In a recent masterful article, Professor Robert Sanger revealed that, since the Supreme Court's decision in Atkins v. Virginia, some prosecution experts have begun using so-called "ethnic adjustments" to artificially raise minority defendants' IQ scores, making such defendants-who would otherwise have been protected by Atkins and, later, by Hall v. Florida-eligible for the death penalty. Sanger accurately concluded that ethnic adjustments are not logically or clinically appropriate when computing a person's IQ score for Atkins purposes. He relied further on epigenetics to demonstrate that environmental factors-such as childhood abuse, poverty, stress, and trauma-can cause decreases in actual IQ scores, and …