Even some of the cases of retarded defendants who actually are guilty can be hair-raising. Texas' Johnny Paul Penry, for example -- who has had his death sentence overturned by the Supreme Court twice in 12 years -- still believes in Santa Claus. Also in Texas, Cruz, convicted in 1988 of participating with an accomplice in the rape and murder of a young woman named Kelly Donovan, received his death sentence thanks to the plea-bargain testimony of his decidedly unimpaired accomplice. Cruz, with an I.Q. of 64 and a family history of schizophrenia, "waived" his Miranda rights and confessed -- a confession accepted by the courts even though the police officer who took it admitted on the stand that Cruz had no capacity to understand the words in his Miranda warning or what waiving rights might mean.

And then, when Cruz faced the sentencing jury, the prosecutor turned his mental impairment into the reason for his execution: "It makes him, in fact, more dangerous. It's part of the outlook of Oliver Cruz that makes him what he is," the jury was told. Cruz was executed in Texas in August.

This year, Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing false death row convictions in which retardation played a key role, such as the case of Earl Washington of Virginia, who has an I.Q. of 57. After a long police interrogation in 1983, Washington confessed to a whole series of crimes he never committed: a burglary, a rape and a fatal stabbing, the last of which landed him on death row. It took until 2000 before DNA tests fully exonerated him.

On Monday, a group of nine prominent retired U.S. diplomats filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, which is considering retardation in death penalty cases, arguing that such executions so strongly violate world norms that they interfere with American foreign policy. Among the signers of the brief was Thomas Pickering, who represented the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration in El Salvador during the most contentious years of that country's civil war.

Proponents of capital punishment like Gov. Jeb Bush realize that when it comes to mental retardation, they have a problem. Even in Texas, recent polls show that the public overwhelmingly opposes the execution of retarded inmates like Johnny Paul Penry or Oliver Cruz.

And in Europe this week, Bush can expect to hear more about executions of the retarded and the death penalty in general. Twenty years after France abolished the guillotine, the European Union this year made abolition of the death penalty its top human rights priority worldwide. France now refuses to extradite any American criminal suspect who might face capital charges -- a refusal that reached crisis proportions for the Ashcroft Justice Department in the case of James Kopp, the accused shooter of Buffalo, N.Y., obstetrician Bernard Slepian, who is still being held in a Brittany jail. Germany is suing the U.S. over the execution of a German national never advised of his consular rights. And in the Republic of Ireland last week, voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum abolishing capital punishment from the constitution.

When a reporter asked Bush about capital punishment as he landed in Spain, the president said, "I refuse to let any issue isolate America from Europe." But the evidence suggests that the death penalty is already isolating the U.S. in Europe as it increasingly divides Americans at home.

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