A federal appeals court granted a stay of execution Wednesday to a Texas inmate just one day before he was scheduled to die for the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old woman during a carjacking in Houston. In an 18-page opinion filed Thursday, a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that under recent case law and intellectual disability standards, Dexter Johnson is sufficiently impaired intellectually to disqualify him for Thursday’s execution. The Supreme Court in 2002 barred execution of mentally disabled people but has given states some discretion to decide how to determine intellectual disability.
