"Adjusting IQ Scores so More Minorities Are Eligible for the Death Penalty"

"An excellent article by Robert Sanger calls attention to a particular sort of challenge to IQ scores that has developed in the Atkins context. This challenge or critique provides that African Americans, Latinos, and Latinas are disserved by IQ tests, as life experiences of deprivation, for instance, produce artificially low scores on such tests, relative to the test-takers’ true ability. In some contexts, this critique could help minorities applying for jobs and educational opportunities. Here, however, the proposal is to give minority defendants a “bump up” on their IQ scores so that they qualify to be executed.

My first reaction, upon considering this phenomenon, was to imagine a story in The Onion (a satirical online magazine) titled “Ku Klux Klan Acknowledges Racial Bias in IQ Tests; Seeks to Remedy By Executing More Minorities.” In the “What Do You Think?” section of The Onion, one African American’s reaction could be, “Finally, the Klan recognizes that standardized IQ tests are unfair to us. And if I’m not good enough for Harvard, at least I might be good enough for death row; it’s a first step.” Jonathan Swift might have had fun with this very different kind of “modest proposal.”

These arguments, however, are not jokes and must therefore be taken seriously, notwithstanding their vulnerability to satire. According to Sanger, the highest courts of several states, including Alabama, have allowed the proposed racial IQ adjustments. So what is wrong with this practice?...

For our limited purposes here, retaining a healthy skepticism toward the Supreme Court’s stingy attitude toward race-based assistance to minorities, consider that upwardly adjusting minority test scores sounds like a form of state-sponsored affirmative action, something to which the Supreme Court has arguably been too hostile. Generally, affirmative action at its best is aimed at either rectifying specific racial injustices or at fostering a needed diversity in such venues as educational environments.

Neither of these justifications has any purchase in the death penalty context. We do nothing to rectify past racial injustices by rendering more minority defendants eligible for execution. Indeed, we arguably do just the opposite, given the existing overrepresentation of minorities within the criminal justice system and the complex history of discrimination within the death penalty itself."

https://verdict.justia.com/2015/11/20/adjusting-iq-scores-so-more-minorities-are-eligible-for-the-death-penalty

mmmmm.
It's scary sometimes, looking at it, where people are open to seeing problems and where they aren't.

Like, that this could happen before other acknowledgments; before the College Board even just moves the questions about race and gender to the end of the test.
(credit to EG)