The US Supreme Court refused to halt Tuesday's scheduled execution of a Texas inmate who has been diagnosed as mentally retarded, a decade after banning executions of such people as cruel and unusual punishment.
Marvin Wilson, 54, had challenged his execution as unconstitutional under the 2002 decision Atkins v. Virginia, which banned executing mentally retarded people but gave states some discretion in deciding who qualified for protection.
The defendant was convicted of murder for the November 1992 killing of a 21-year-old police drug informant, Jerry Robert Williams, and was sentenced to death in April 1994.
