May 27, 2014

Supreme Court re-endorses IQ

As we all know IQ is a hoax and a useless concept of no validity. Except ...
Court Rules Against Florida I.Q. Rule in Death Cases
By ADAM LIPTAK MAY 27, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that Florida had adopted too rigid a cutoff in deciding who is eligible to be spared the death penalty on account of intellectual disabilities. 
“Florida seeks to execute a man because he scored a 71 instead of 70 on an I.Q. test,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision. He was joined by court’s four more liberal members. 
When the court barred the execution of people with mental disabilities in 2002 in Atkins v. Virginia, it largely let the states determine who qualified. ...
The case, Hall v. Florida, No. 12-10882, arose from the 1978 murder

So this case is 36 years old -- even for a death penalty case that's a long time.
of Karol Hurst, who was 21 and seven months pregnant when Freddie L. Hall and an accomplice forced her into her car in a supermarket parking lot. She was found in a wooded area, where she had been beaten, sexually assaulted and shot. 

How high of an IQ do you need to know you shouldn't beat, sexually assault, and shoot a seven months pregnant woman?

By the way, then Hall and his accomplice killed a cop. (You can kind of see why the State of Florida has been trying to execute this guy for 36 years.)
There was significant evidence in school and court records that Mr. Hall was “mentally retarded.” Before the Supreme Court’s decision in the Atkins case, a trial judge found that there was “substantial evidence” that Mr. Hall “has been mentally retarded his entire life.” 
After the Atkins decision, Mr. Hall challenged his death sentence, relying in part on the earlier state court determinations.

Well, Mr. Hall may not understand "Thou shalt not kill," but he's still managed to win a Supreme Court case.
The Atkins decision gave states only general guidance. It said a finding of mental retardation requires proof of three things: “subaverage intellectual functioning,” meaning low I.Q. scores; a lack of fundamental social and practical skills; and the presence of both conditions before age 18. The court said I.Q. scores under “approximately 70” typically indicate retardation. 
A Florida law enacted not long before the Atkins decision created what Mr. Hall’s lawyers called an “inflexible bright-line cutoff” requiring proof of an I.Q. of 70 or below. In 2012, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Hall could be executed because his I.Q. had been measured at various times as 71, 73 and 80. 
The court returned Mr. Hall’s case to the lower courts for a fresh assessment of his condition. “Freddie Lee Hall may or may not be intellectually disabled,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “but the law requires that he have the opportunity to present evidence of his intellectual disability, including deficits in adaptive functioning over his lifetime.”

I wrote about the Supreme Court's 2002 IQ decision:
Analysis: IQ defenders feel vindicated 
Several IQ researchers, accustomed to having their field of expertise ignored or denounced as racist and fraudulent, were bemused by Thursday's vote by six Supreme Court Justices to ban the execution of murderers, in effect, who score poorly on IQ tests. 
As staunch defenders of the much-maligned concept of the intelligence quotient, these scientists found vindication in the Supreme Court's embrace of intelligence testing, though they cautioned that the Justices' understanding of the complex subject was simplistic. 
The IQ experts were particularly amused that newspapers that routinely condemn IQ tests as biased and meaningless were quick to endorse intelligence exams in this case. The New York Times, for example, editorialized, "[I]nflicting the death penalty on individuals with I.Q. scores of less than 70 who have little understanding of their moral culpability violates civilized standards of justice." 
Linda S. Gottfredson, co-director of the University of Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society, said, "Just about the only time I see journalists and liberals take IQ seriously is when it meets their ideological predilections. For example, they treat IQ as real when anyone claims that early intervention raises it, but not when evidence goes the other way. And so it is with crime. We are told we must not link IQ with crime, unless low IQ can be used to roll back the death penalty." ... 
More controversial among the IQ experts was the Court's assertion that the "deficiencies (of the mentally retarded) do not warrant an exemption from criminal sanctions, but diminish their personal culpability." 
Psychometrician Chris Brand, a consultant with the Woodhill Foundation and a one-time staff psychologist at a British prison, agreed. 
"My inclination is to say the low IQ do know murder is wrong, but that their grasp and control of their own actions is rather slight when temper or sex are roused or drink is taken," he said. 
On the other hand, the death penalty is seldom applied in crimes of passion. It's more likely to be demanded in aggravated cases where the murderer showed logical foresight, such as by killing his robbery or rape victims to prevent them from identifying him. 
Some of the IQ experts were skeptical of whether avoiding aggravated murder required much in the way of sophisticated powers of reasoning. (All agreed, however, that individuals with scores below 50 suffered profound limitations.) 
Richard Lynn, a professor emeritus of psychometrics at the University of Ulster, suggested, "An adult with an IQ of 70 has the mental age of the average 11.5 year old child, and these will certainly know that killing people is wrong." 
Gottfredson suggested, "Most individuals below the 75 IQ level understand the basic rules of society. They know that hurting other people is wrong. They are not uncivilized. I have a mildly retarded brother and he is very aware of moral standards of right and wrong." 
Some IQ experts were concerned that the Supreme Court's ruling would make the low IQ appear as morally less than fully human by officially labeling them as inherently less able to comprehend basic ethical rules such as "Thou shalt not kill." 
This is an issue of surprisingly broad social importance. The intelligence researchers noted that while IQs below 70 or 75 are extremely rare in the kind of circles that modern Supreme Court justices travel in, they are much more common in other social settings. 
The researchers said that the majority of low IQ individuals do not suffer from medical problems such as Down's Syndrome. Gottfredson noted, "About 75 percent-80 percent of mental retardation is called 'familial,' because it mostly just represents the unlucky combinations of genes that are passed in the normal manner from parents to children. Only a small proportion of mental retardation is due to organic problems, such as chromosomal abnormalities or brain damage. This is just like height. Most very short people are perfectly normal." 
The stereotype that most low IQ children are what obstetricians often callously refer to in their notes as FLKs - "Funny Looking Kids" is not true. Elite members of American society tend not to realize this because when an extremely high-IQ person, such as a Supreme Court justice, has a retarded child, it's generally due to organic causes. 
As children, these "familial" low-IQ individuals fit in well on the playground, where they may be indistinguishable from their higher-IQ friends. They are normal, except that they run into problems when they need to do the higher-order, abstract thinking that a modern society rewards. ...
Finally, the Court's decision officially designates that a much larger fraction of the African-American population is of diminished moral capability compared to the white and East Asian populations. About 2 percent-3 percent of whites or East Asians don't exceed 70 on IQ tests, vs. 10 percent-12 percent of American blacks (and more than 20 percent score below 75). 
     

48 comments:

Biff said...

Anyone have a clue how IQ 50 humans compare with smart animals? Was Nim Chimpsky tested? I have a vague idea that IQ is most accurate around 100, but you'd think people who like to order their pets around would have quantified this.

Anonymous said...

Rushton (I think it was Rushton -- someone correct me if I'm misremembering) noted that 70 IQ blacks were much higher functioning than 70 IQ whites. In essence, I think he concluded that the latter were so far to the left side of the bell curve for whites that they usually had serious genetic problems that led to their low IQ, whereas this was not the case for as many of the black individuals in that IQ range.

If we're serious about using IQ as a proxy for moral understanding, Rushton's research would seem to suggest that a 70 IQ black has more moral understanding than a 70 IQ white.

Anonymous said...

by all means let us put the line for mental retardation back to 85 where it belongs.

Anonymous said...

My niece...blond hair blue eyes...came very close to suffering the same fate as Karol Hurst two years ago...very close upstate NY...it was a paroled Black with a sexual assault history. Thinking about what could have happned I get a very sick feeling in my gut. Yet millions of White Men sit in football and basketball arenas fantasizing that they are good buddies with their favorite Black Jock. Go google a photo of Karol Hurst with her three year White son......

Bill Blizzard and his Men

Dahlia said...

Related: my pediatrician told me the other day that her youngest labelled-retarded patient is 21. As rates of "autism" have climbed, rates for "mental retardation" have plummeted she said with an eye roll. She won't debate with parents whose children are wrongly-labelled, she supposes they're in denial and find autism more acceptable.
Literally the day before, I met the most gregarious 15-year-old. Excellent eye contact, even rubbed mine and other's back...a social butterfly despite being retarded. Dad explained his odd son as being autistic (!).
I believe autism is genuinely rising from what I understand, but I don't know.

Anyway, mental retardation has become a condition that dares not speak its name.

Anonymous said...

So if Sub-Saharan Africans have an average IQ of 69 and the cutoff for execution is 70...

Disparate impact indeed.

Gordo

dearieme said...

If 71 is too near 70, then 72 is too near 71; and 73 is too near 72 ....

They must have intended this.

Mr. Rational said...

Perhaps the limit should be 2 standard deviations below the mean for the perp's racial or ethnic group.  After all, if behavior is going to be race-normed, why shouldn't criminal culpability?

Anonymous said...

Specific IQ scores are a troublesome "shorthand" to the fact that IQ can only be measured in a band that is defined by degrees of likelihood that the "true" (underlying) "score" is somewhere within it--e.g,
Johnny's overall performance on the IQ test is such that there is a 85% likelihood he surpasses at least 87 out of 100 children his age and , in turn, is surpassed by 6 (?) out 100 children his age.
What would aid all this is some
format/ signal system/ to denote that the "ability distance" from an IQ 130 to an IQ 145 is much much greater than it is from IQ 115 to IQ 130. The "giant" status
of IQ's in the 145-160 range is
obscured by conventional numerical
representation. If it all mattered to the profit margins of the major test publishers, the
"troublesome" misunderstanding potential would have been rectified long ago. It doesn't.

Anonymous said...

Specific IQ scores are a troublesome "shorthand" to the fact that IQ can only be measured in a band that is defined by degrees of likelihood that the "true" (underlying) "score" is somewhere within it--e.g,
Johnny's overall performance on the IQ test is such that there is a 85% likelihood he surpasses at least 87 out of 100 children his age and , in turn, is surpassed by 6 (?) out 100 children his age.
What would aid all this is some
format/ signal system/ to denote that the "ability distance" from an IQ 130 to an IQ 145 is much much greater than it is from IQ 115 to IQ 130. The "giant" status
of IQ's in the 145-160 range is
obscured by conventional numerical
representation. If it all mattered to the profit margins of the major test publishers, the
"troublesome" misunderstanding potential would have been rectified long ago. It doesn't.

Anonymous said...

Specific IQ scores are a troublesome "shorthand" to the fact that IQ can only be measured in a band that is defined by degrees of likelihood that the "true" (underlying) "score" is somewhere within it--e.g,
Johnny's overall performance on the IQ test is such that there is a 85% likelihood he surpasses at least 87 out of 100 children his age and , in turn, is surpassed by 6 (?) out 100 children his age.
What would aid all this is some
format/ signal system/ to denote that the "ability distance" from an IQ 130 to an IQ 145 is much much greater than it is from IQ 115 to IQ 130. The "giant" status
of IQ's in the 145-160 range is
obscured by conventional numerical
representation. If it all mattered to the profit margins of the major test publishers, the
"troublesome" misunderstanding potential would have been rectified long ago. It doesn't.

Anonymous said...

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/05/141875-wapo-film-critic-blames-mass-shooting-hollywood-white-mens-escapist-fantasies/

Dumb bitch has one thing in common with Rodgers. Blame whitey.

Never mind Hollywood is run by Jews and homos.
Never mind porn is controlled by Jews.
And rap culture of thuggery has been promoted by Jews and Libs.

Geoff Matthews said...

I've thought that our reasoning on IQ and punishment is backwards. The mentally retarded are less likely to reform, I believe, than those with an average IQ, so I'd be more in favor of their execution.

Sal said...

Sterling is a southerner.

Zimmerman is a white hispanic.

Rodgers is a ... white asian?

Assistant Village Idiot said...

It is clear that while the official PC position is not to believe IQ means that much, many people quietly believe it anyway. They believe their children's SAT's mean something, and they believe that Wechslers tell us something as well. I wonder what a secret ballot would reveal, when the opprobrium of ones associates was no longer in play?

Chris Mallory said...

I spent some time working in a residential setting with "developmentally disable" adults. You basically had 3 groups. The profoundly retarded. Basically infants in adult bodies. Usually harmless. The Down's Syndrome "residents" were usually harmless as well.

Then you had the borderline group. They had IQs in the upper 60s to low 70s. They usually had substance abuse issues as well as what ever medical problems they had. This group was composed of some of the most dangerous people I have ever been around. They knew how to plan crimes and how to work the system. They had no problems committing rape and assault. Murder was not something I had to deal with, but a few years later one of the safe residents was stomped to death by one of the borderlines. They knew right from wrong, they just didn't care.

peterike said...

Of course, in a sane society, a low IQ would be a factor encouraging the death penalty for somebody, not preventing it. But we stopped being sane a long time ago.

marty said...

Can anyone from Florida explain why this guy wasn't executed long ago?

Anonymous said...

Well, as usual. If you have enough IQ to kill, you have enough IQ to be killed.

If you have not enough IQ to not kill without good motive, you also have not enough IQ to go around free.

Gunther Marshall said...

Has there been a SCOTUS "Justice" with an IQ below 100 in the last 100 years? Doubtful.

How about below 115?

Anonymous said...

I'm completely against the death penalty but letting someone off (any punishment) on the grounds of stupidity is wrong...If this is fair then its also fair to deny full citizenship to those deemed too stupid to be in possession of basic morals. If any government in the states even thought of doing this for a seconds the criest of "Hitler" from the left would be endless.

Anonymous said...

Gunther Marshall said..."Has there been a SCOTUS "Justice" with an IQ below 100 in the last 100 years? Doubtful.

How about below 115?"

Thurgood Marshall? If he had an original thought after joining the court, he hid it well.

Anonymous said...

Do we disenfranchise if someone's IQ is too low? Why not? And yet we can eliminate societal punishment based on the same determining IQ?

Makes perfect sense!

Anonymous said...

St. Ronnie's SCOTUS pick, the gift that keeps on giving.

jody said...

there are probably 1 billion third worlders with a mental capability that would score a 70 on a standardized intelligence test. are they to be exempted from laws?

70 is still in the normal range for a lot of countries. 70 is in the normal range for pure blooded africans in the US! as i posted in the thread about a baseball player 'too dumb to tie his shoes', there are millions of africans running around in america who would score a 70 on a wechsler or stanford-binet. they still function fine, if slowly. so now a big chunk of the african population can't be executed for knowingly killing people?

E. Rekshun said...

This SCOTUS decision is another slow, quiet, intentional step toward the eventual outlawing of the death penalty. Obama will get at least one more Supreme Court Justice pick (possibly two) and that will wrap it up.

Robert What? said...

You should buy your niece a stylish pistol or revolver she can fit in her purse and also get her a few training sessions at a local range. Hopefully she lives in a concealed carry state.

Anonymous said...

If you're too stupid to NOT kill, shouldn't you be put to death? Would you want to be a guard or another prisoner around someone like this?

Chicago said...

Illinois death row inmate Anthony Porter, convicted of a double murder, had appeals made on his behalf for the same reason, that he was too dumb to kill. Then some supporters got him off death row by convincing a judge he was really innocent. After getting out he was mobbed by the media, an innocent man railroaded by the system. On television he came across as mentally competent, being able to interact with the media and field questions. Not what people think of when they think of someone who's retarded.
He later sued but seemingly inexplicably the jury refused to award him anything. The defendants fought the case by presenting evidence that Porter was actually guilty all along and was properly found guilty. According to police author Martin Preib (Crooked City) Porter's supporters apparently hornswoggled some other not very bright person into confessing to the murders and thus got Porter sprung and the other person incarcerated. It now looks like a huge mess with Preib and others stating the innocence crusaders got a guilty man off and an innocent man locked up.

Stan D Mute said...

I had much more respect and admiration for Linda Gottfredson before I knew she wrote this, "Most very short people are perfectly normal."

It's been my experience that most very short people are abnormally short..

Stan D Mute said...

I've actually been looking for this for a few weeks. I should have known to just bide my time and it would appear here on iSteve.

10-12% of Afro Americans have IQ of 70 or below and 20% have IQ of 75 or below.

My mathmagical skills aren't what Mr Sailer's are, but I think this means we harbor in the ballpark of 4,000,000-4,800,000 Afros who meet the definition of "retarded". And around 8,000,000 of them are "borderline" or lower.

Expressed that way, the numbers seem staggering. What are the white population percentages and gross numbers? What are the mestizo and indio numbers?

How many borderline retarded and lower people can a nation of 300,000,000 support?

Of these 8,000,000 Afro American borderline and full retards, how many are driving a motor vehicle at any moment? Operating any other machinery or handling guns or pointy objects?

I may not want to leave my house anymore!

Dennis Dale said...

“Florida seeks to execute a man because he scored a 71 instead of 70 on an I.Q. test,”

Odd, I was of the impression they wanted to execute him for the rape and murder of a pregnant woman and a police officer.

Dennis Dale said...

This is just the soft bigotry of low expectations!

Mamin said...

"Finally, the Court's decision officially designates that a much larger fraction of the African-American population is of diminished moral capability compared to the white and East Asian populations."

Liberals already designate a much larger fraction of AAs as morally deficient than 12% or even 20% if you philosophically weigh their policies and views.

Anonymous said...

It seems to me that there's a great deal of incentive for a man on death row to score very, very low on any IQ test he's asked to take.

Aaron said...

From the article:

Persons facing that most severe sanction must have a fair opportunity to show that the Constitution prohibits their execution.

How does the constitution prohibit the death penalty?

NOTA said...

It seems like this has very little to do with intelligence or IQ, and a lot to do with the fact that the supreme court would probably like to roll back the death penalty a bit.

Now, this case is a f--king travesty--it's nuts to have a man sitting on death row for 36 years. And I'm not too confident that a guy with an IQ of 70 actually understood what was going on w.r.t. his trial, or any confession he might have signed, or whatever. But I assume that SC cases about political policy issues are generally decided on the basis of what these nine permanently-appointed politicians would rather see US policy look like, rather than the law or the constitution.

NOTA said...

I also thought it was an annoying gap in the NPR coverage of this case that they never bothered to work out:

a. What fraction of the population has an IQ below 70.

b. What fraction of various ethnic groups (especially blacks and whites) have an IQ below 70.

You're looking at something like 16% of the black population who would be excluded from execution by this rule--which seems kinda high. I mean, I'm fine with getting rid of the death penalty, but if we're going to have it, we'd probably like it to apply to most people who have a basic understanding that raping and murdering people is wrong and will get you in trouble with the law.

NOTA said...

Anon 6:39:

I wonder how they deal with that. Even a pretty dumb person can probably manage to do badly on a test, but it might take some intelligence to do plausibly badly on a test, rather than obviously ditching it.

Anonymous said...

"Rushton ( I think it was... ) that 0 IQ Blacks were significantly higher functioning
than 70 IQ Whites." I believe you may be referring to Arthur Jensen? Jensen and one or two of is graduate students noticed on the playgrounds at schools that among children identified as mildly mentally retarded, Blacks seemed to adapt to the playground tasks notably better than Whites with similar measured IQ scores.
This in part led to his exploration of Level I and Level II abilities. While these groupings arose from factor analysis, it may well be that they are counterpart of Pavlov's
regard to a first and second signaling system (non-language and language ). Jensen, upon re-reading Spearman, discarded his
Level I and Level II conceptions in favor of Spearman's "g". During this time (early 70's ) Jensen had also begun working in his laboratory with brain wave measurements correlative to IQ and in due course he evolved his
choice reaction time apparatus that has a modest but scientifically important correlation with "g".

Anonymous said...

From careful observations made by Europeans upon first encountering the aboriginal populations of Australia and especially of Tasmania, the average "IQ" would
appear to have been far below the current cut off. The Tasmanians, in particular, were so dull as to be considered subhuman. Both aboriginal populations had evolved no understanding of the relationship between sexual intercourse and pregnancy, for example.

Charlesz Martel said...

Could someone please explain to me how, as the death penalty is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, it's unconstitutional? "No person shall be deprived of life....without due process"
-doesn't this mean it's explicitly recognized as constitutional?

Anonymous said...

IQ scores bear a fairly high
correlation to ability estimates that come from close observation of skilled work tasks--or unskilled labor, for that matter.
The sorts of task challenges that
are part of IQ measurements involving block design tests, or
pattern completion tests, of arranging "puzzle pieces", etc.
are obvious in many aspects of motor-performance labor. Black IQ, in reality, was measured long before Galton and Binet in work tasks on plantations.

Rob said...

As far as I know, there's no IQ test for being allowed to vote, serve on a jury, etc. So low-IQ people are supposed to be shielded from the consequences of their actions, but have the right to make decisions affecting others.

Anonymous said...

I believe you may be referring to Arthur Jensen?

I was thinking of Jensen; thank you.

Anonymous said...

In the science of human cognition-behavior, there is
no debasement/ no "vo tech" vulgarity/ in melding IQ measurement with structured observation. At a time with
ubiquitous access to audio-video
recording, it is possible to record clearly interactions with
a suspected mentally retarded prisoner and to get a very clear notion of whether he/she has a sense of responsibility. Mental-emotional disorder is so often
woven into these people that the sense of responsibility may not be clearly indicated by a mere IQ score. It is a condition that you know when you see it, and it is a little pseudo-scientific /
pseudo-quantitative to demand that it has to be yielded up in some
fashion of, say, a chemical analysis of a soil sample.

Anonymous said...

So if you are a lo-IQ moron you get a pass when you viciously kill a pregnant woman? Since a normal IQ person will get the death penalty, this is affirmative action for morons. Crazy killers too. They get a pass while the non-crazy gets tried and executed.

This violates equal protection under the law in the US Constitution. "The Equal Protection Clause is part of the Fourteenth Amendment"

Anonymous said...

Then you had the borderline group. They had IQs in the upper 60s to low 70s. They usually had substance abuse issues as well as what ever medical problems they had. This group was composed of some of the most dangerous people I have ever been around. They knew how to plan crimes and how to work the system. They had no problems committing rape and assault. Murder was not something I had to deal with, but a few years later one of the safe residents was stomped to death by one of the borderlines. They knew right from wrong, they just didn't care.

Also a lifetime of being coddled in government schools and by the juvenile justice system takes away any healthy fear of punishment they may have.

Given that these little monsters know how to "work the system" - they milk every little bit of sympathy from teachers, educrats, doctors, social workers, police, judges, etc - stealing resources that could be used for more deserving children.