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Tag: Developmental disorders

  • Texas to execute man for killing mother nearly 20 years ago

    Texas to execute man for killing mother nearly 20 years ago

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    HOUSTON — A Texas inmate whose lawyers say has a history of mental illness is set to be executed Wednesday for killing his mother and burying her body in her backyard nearly 20 years ago.

    Tracy Beatty, 61, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He was sentenced to death for strangling his mother, Carolyn Click, after they argued in her East Texas home in November 2003.

    Authorities say Beatty buried his 62-year-old mother’s body beside her mobile home in Whitehouse, about 115 miles (180 km) southeast of Dallas, and then spent her money on drugs and alcohol.

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday morning declined an appeal from Beatty’s lawyers to halt the execution. On Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously declined to commute Beatty’s death sentence to a lesser penalty or to grant a six-month reprieve. Beatty has had three prior execution dates.

    His attorneys had argued he was being prevented from receiving a full examination to determine if he is intellectually disabled and possibly ineligible to be put to death. They had requested that state prison officials allow Beatty to be uncuffed during mental health evaluations by experts. The experts argue that having Beatty uncuffed during neurological and other tests is crucial to making an informed decision about intellectual disability and evaluating his mental health.

    In their Supreme Court petition, Beatty’s lawyers said one expert who examined the inmate determined that he was “clearly psychotic and has a complex paranoid delusional belief system” and that he lives in a “complex delusional world” where he believes there is a “vast conspiracy of correctional officers who … ‘torture’ him via a device in his ear so he can hear their menacing voices.”

    Citing security and liability concerns, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice put in place an informal policy last year that would require a court order to allow an inmate to be unshackled during an expert evaluation.

    Federal judges in East Texas and Houston and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans previously ruled against Beatty’s request for an evaluation without handcuffs. The federal appeals court called Beatty’s request a “delay tactic.”

    U.S. District Judge Charles Eskridge in Houston last week questioned why Beatty’s lawyers had not raised any claim relating to his mental health during years of appeals, and said requiring handcuffs during such an evaluation is “quite simply, a rational security concern.”

    While the U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the death penalty for individuals who are intellectually disabled, it has not barred such punishment for those with serious mental illness, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that provides analysis and information on capital punishment.

    The Texas Legislature considered but did not pass a bill in 2019 that would have prohibited the death penalty for someone with severe mental illness.

    Beatty had a “volatile and combative relationship” with his mother, according to prosecutors. One neighbor, Lieanna Wilkerson, testified that Click told her Beatty had assaulted her several times before, including once when he had “beaten her so severely that he had left her for dead.” But Wilkerson said Click had still been excited to have Beatty move back in with her in October 2003 so they could mend their relationship.

    Mother and son argued daily, however, and Click asked Beatty twice to move out, including just before she was killed, according to testimony from Beatty’s 2004 trial.

    “Several times (Beatty) had said he just wanted to shut her up, that he just wanted to choke her and shut her up,” Wilkerson testified.

    If Beatty is executed, he would be the fourth inmate put to death this year in Texas and the 13th in the U.S. Texas’ last execution for this year is scheduled to take place next week.

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    Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70

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  • Appeals Court weighs death row inmate’s disability claims

    Appeals Court weighs death row inmate’s disability claims

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    NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Attorneys for Tennessee death row inmate Byron Black told a state appeals court on Tuesday that he should not be executed because he is intellectually disabled.

    Black is appealing a ruling by a Nashville judge earlier this year that denied his motion to be declared intellectually disabled. The judge noted that a state and federal court have previously determined Black does not meet the criteria. But his attorneys argued on Tuesday that the criteria have changed, as has the law.

    Tennessee enacted a new law last year updating the standards to be used when determining intellectual disability. It also provides a way for inmates who have exhausted their direct appeals to reopen their cases in order to bring an intellectual disability claim. However, the defendant cannot file a new disability claim “if the issue of whether the defendant has an intellectual disability has been previously adjudicated on the merits.”

    Senior Assistant Attorney General Katharine Decker told a panel of the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals on Tuesday that by the plain language of the statute, Black, 66, is barred from seeking a third adjudication of his intellectual disability claims.

    “Don’t we have a constitutional duty not to execute someone who is intellectually disabled?” Judge Camille McMullen asked.

    Decker replied that the new law is limited in terms of who it allows to pursue those claims.

    Judge Tom Greenholtz questioned whether the previous determination that Black was not mentally retarded qualifies as a determination that he is not intellectually disabled.

    “It’s just a different label,” Decker responded.

    “Is it though? It’s a different label with different criteria,” Greenholtz said. “For you to prevail, ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘intellectually disabled’ must mean exactly the same thing.”

    Federal Public Defender Kelley Henry, who represents Black, pointed to a different section of the new law, which reads, “Notwithstanding any law to the contrary, no defendant with intellectual disability at the time of committing first degree murder shall be sentenced to death.”

    “It would be an insult to the Tennessee Supreme Court and our legislature to deny people like Mr. Black a fair hearing,” she said.

    Henry suggested the court could decide the case without having to interpret whether the statute applies to Black. That’s because Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk has already agreed that Black is intellectually disabled and should be resentenced to life in prison. Funk said he was persuaded by the fact that an expert who had previously testified for the state that Black didn’t meet the criteria for intellectually disabled has changed her opinion.

    “He believed justice, in this case, is that Mr. Black not be subject to execution,” Henry said of Funk.

    In Henry’s view, the state — via Funk — has already waived any argument that the statute doesn’t apply to Black, so the state can’t now make that argument via the Attorney General. She asked the Appeals Court to send the case back to the lower court judge for a hearing on Black’s claims “to prevent the execution of a man with an intellectual disability, which is the policy of this state.”

    Black was convicted in the 1988 shooting deaths of girlfriend Angela Clay, 29, and her two daughters, Latoya, 9, and Lakeisha, 6. Prosecutors said Black was in a jealous rage when he shot the three at their home. At the time, Black was on work release while serving time for shooting and wounding Clay’s estranged husband.

    Black had been scheduled to be executed in August before Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee paused all executions in order to investigate a problem the state had with lethal injection.

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  • Scientists grow human brain cells in rats to study diseases

    Scientists grow human brain cells in rats to study diseases

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    Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.

    It’s part of an effort to better study human brain development and diseases affecting this most complex of organs, which makes us who we are but has long been shrouded in mystery.

    “Many disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are likely uniquely human” but “the human brain certainly has not been very accessible,” said said Dr. Sergiu Pasca, senior author of a study describing the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

    Approaches that don’t involve taking tissue out of the human brain are “promising avenues in trying to tackle these conditions.”

    The research builds upon the team’s previous work creating brain “organoids,” tiny structures resembling human organs that have also been made to represent others such as livers, kidneys, prostates, or key parts of them.

    To make the brain organoids, Stanford University scientists transformed human skin cells into stem cells and then coaxed them to become several types of brain cells. Those cells then multiplied to form organoids resembling the cerebral cortex, the human brain’s outermost layer, which plays a key role in things like memory, thinking, learning, reasoning and emotions.

    Scientists transplanted those organoids into rat pups 2 to 3 days old, a stage when brain connections are still forming. The organoids grew so that they eventually occupied a third of the hemisphere of the rat’s brain where they were implanted. Neurons from the organoids formed working connections with circuits in the brain.

    Human neurons have been transplanted in rodents before, but generally in adult animals, usually mice. Pasca, a psychiatry professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, said this is the first time these organoids have been placed into early rat brains, creating “the most advanced human brain circuitry ever built from human skin cells and a demonstration that implanted human neurons can influence an animal’s behavior.”

    To examine a practical use of this approach, scientists transplanted organoids into both sides of a rat’s brain: one generated from a healthy person’s cells and another from the cells of a person with Timothy syndrome, a rare genetic condition associated with heart problems and autism spectrum disorder.

    Five to six months later, they saw effects of the disease related to the activity of the neurons. There were differences in the two sides’ electrical activity, and the neurons from the person with Timothy syndrome were much smaller and didn’t sprout as many extensions that pick up input from nearby neurons.

    Researchers, whose study was funded partly by the National Institutes of Health, said they could do the same sorts of experiments using organoids made from the cells of people with disorders such as autism or schizophrenia — and potentially learn new things about how these conditions affect the brain, too.

    Dr. Flora Vaccarino of Yale University – who previously grew lumps containing cerebral cortex that were made with DNA from people with autism – said the study moves the field forward.

    “It’s extremely impressive what they do here in terms of what these cells can actually show us in terms of their advanced development … in the rat,” said Vaccarino, who wasn’t involved with the study.

    Such experiments in animals raise ethical concerns. For example, Pasca said he and his team are cognizant of the rats’ well-being and whether they still behave normally with the organoids inside them, which he says they do. Still, Pasca does not believe this should be tried in primates. Ethicists also wonder about the possibility of brain organoids in the future attaining something like human consciousness, which experts say is extremely unlikely now.

    Some scientists are studying human brain organoids outside of animals. For example, researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland published a study in Nature earlier this month describing how they are growing brain-like tissue from stem cells in the lab and then mapping the cell types in various brain regions and genes regulating their development. Some are using these structures to study autism.

    Pasca said brain organoids could also be used to test new treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders, the largest cause of disability worldwide. Such research, he said, should help scientists make strides that have been extremely difficult until now because it’s so hard to get at the human brain – which is “the reason why we’re so much more behind in psychiatry compared to any other branch of medicine in terms of therapeutics.”

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    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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