The crime was undeniably horrific.Wendell Grissom was sentenced to death for a 2005 murder characterized by the wanton targeting of a remote Blaine County home and a perhaps misogynistic attack on women and children. The shooting that ended the life of Amber Matthews was more like an execution — c arried out while Amber held one of the two daughters of her friend, Dreu Kopf, who was shot but survived the attack.Grissom’s crime was also inexplicable. Prosecutors on the case said that while all murders are senseless, the murder of Amber Matthews was truly senseless. The crime was so beyond the pale that Grissom’s first lawyer, John Coyle, made no attempt to explain it at trial, even though he was aware that Grissom had suffered multiple brain traumas, at birth and in a series of motorcycle accidents in his youth.Years later, private investigator Brenda McCray, hired for Grissom’s appeal, questioned eliminating Grissom’s brain damage from the case.“The element of brain damage is precisely the kind of information that can make the crime explainable,” she said.Subsequently, Coyle agreed.“There are some critical areas that we failed to investigate without a strategic or tactical reason for doing so,” he said. the latest Competent to Die: State’s Arbitrary IQ Rule Defies Scientific Recommendation by JC Hallman March 12, 2025March 11, 2025 Grissom’s brain damage was not introduced in his case, outside of appeals court proceedings, until a February 5 clemency hearing, when the five-member Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board saw detailed reports on significant abnormalities in Grissom’s brain, as revealed by CT and MRI scans.The board voted 4-1 to deny clemency, anyway.Now, only a possible pardon from Gov. Kevin Stitt stands in the way of Grissom’s March 20 execution.Oklahoma’s Definition of Mental Disability Might Not Be ConstitutionalThe execution of the intellectually disabled has been forbidden in the United States since 2002, when a Supreme Court case, Atkins v. Virginia, overturned a 13-year-old precedent.Overnight, the law changed nationwide.What followed, said Jeffrey B. Welty, Professor of Public Law and Government at the University of North Carolina, who has particular expertise in capital punishment, was a tsunami of litigation — attorneys attempting to use the Atkins decision to reduce sentences for death row clients.“Atkins applies to people being sentenced today, people being sentenced tomorrow, and people sentenced in the past,” Welty said.The Atkins ruling left it to states to determine how intellectual disability should be defined, paving the way for additional precedent.In 2014, the Supreme Court shot down an effort in Florida to set intellectual disability at an IQ of 70 or below, a definition that derived from the description of “intellectual developmental disorder” in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM-5, published in 2013.The problem with a 70 IQ standard, the Court ruled, was that it did not account for the margin of error in testing.In 2017, Texas attempted to put a man to death using criteria that drew on a fictional character, Lennie, from John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel, “Of Mice and Men.” Texas asked if an individual could form plans or lie, and whether others had ever believed them to be “mentally retarded.”That was struck down twice because it relied on subjective opinion.Despite those failures, state laws have focused on IQ as a factor. Oklahoma law draws a hard line at 76 IQ.“In no event shall a defendant who has received an intelligence quotient of seventy-six (76) or above … be considered intellectually disabled,” the law reads.Grissom’s IQMedia accounts have tended to focus on Grissom’s crime and his victim. Evidence of his brain damage has received little attention.Grissom’s mother said he was born after a tedious 36-hour labor that restricted oxygen to the brain. Delivery was completed with the use of obstetric forceps, a procedure known to sometimes result in brain damage.Wendell Grissom in 2023 (ODOC Photo)Grissom appeared normal but was slow to learn to speak. When he did, it was in a peculiar, private language.In second grade, Grissom was judged unruly in school and locked in a refrigerator box in a corner of his classroom.At age 8, he was thrown from a motorcycle and knocked unconscious, suffering head wounds that required 18 stitches.At 11, Grissom’s IQ was measured as average, but he was two grades behind in school because of difficulty in auditory processing, stress, and attentional deficits.Of two additional motorcycle accidents at 15 and 16, the first caused severe cuts to his scalp, and the second threw him 90 feet in the air, laying open his face and causing his head to swell to twice its normal size.Grissom was never the same after the accidents and was unable to complete high school, his mother said.Other traumas — possible sexual abuse by a brother-in-law, alcohol and meth addiction, and a mutually abusive marriage — contributed to a life of burglaries and prison stints. Grissom once threatened his wife with a gun, but otherwise, the absence of violence in his criminal record was a factor that made the particularly heinous murder of Amber Matthews difficult to explain.Brain scans later revealed the extent of the damage. His occipital lobe was 20% larger than it should be. His cerebellum was 60% smaller than a normal brain. His lateral ventricle was 10 times too big.A parade of experts agreed. Grissom was cognitively impaired. He suffered from brain damage, especially in the parts of the brain responsible for executive control functions. Worse, it was noted that no scan could measure all of the damage that was likely suffered by a brain subjected to multiple insults.In 2009, he was given a new intelligence test. His IQ was 85.Problems With Oklahoma’s LawThe DSM-5 specifies that intellectual disability may result from severe head injury before age 18.In addition, psychiatry’s most authoritative book offers a stern warning against using a fixed IQ number instead of expert judgment in determining intellectual disability.More specifically, the DSM-5 — the same text that provided the 70 IQ figure that inspired state law — takes pains to insist that individuals with IQs substantially above 65-75 may nevertheless suffer from intellectual disability.Such persons can be “clinically comparable to that of individuals with a lower IQ score,” the manual reads. “Thus, clinical judgment is important in interpreting the results of IQ tests, and using them as the sole criteria of an intellectual developmental disorder is insufficient.”That is exactly what Oklahoma law does. An IQ of 76, achieved on any test at any time, makes one eligible for the death penalty.That struck Professor Welty as peculiar.“I’m not aware of a court case that specifically addressed language like that,” Welty said. “If I were working as a defense attorney in Oklahoma, I would want to question the constitutionality of that. I think it would be reasonable to ask constitutional questions about it, particularly in light of the movement of the relevant professional community, away from a focus on strict numerical measurements or cutoffs.”Vicious Crime, Model PrisonerGrissom’s life on death row complicates the picture of him as either intellectually disabled or a stone-cold killer.In 20 years of incarceration, Grissom has never been written up for an infraction. According to prison officials, a completely clean disciplinary record is an exceptional distinction that would qualify him for minimum security incarceration if it weren’t for his death sentence.A high school dropout not known for literary achievement before prison, Grissom has penned cogent poems and essays while incarcerated. At his clemency hearing, parole board members heard testimony from Grissom’s spiritual advisors, who described him as a humble, honest, and prayerful man. Sister Mary Claire, a Benedictine nun and former director of Tulsa’s Monte Cassino Catholic School, cited the lives that had been beneficially touched when she had shared Grissom’s writings with groups outside of prison.“He is a good man,” Sister Mary Claire said. “He is a great man.”Individuals with intellectual disability are known to benefit from highly structured environments. Death row may mask the extent of Grissom’s disability.Federal public defender Tom Hird told the parole board that he had known Grissom since 2011.“These years have given me the opportunity to get to know Wendell well, not just as a lawyer, but also as a friend,” he said. “It’s also given Wendell more opportunity to do good for many people, including me.”“Thus, clinical judgment is important in interpreting the results of IQ tests, and using them as the sole criteria of an intellectual developmental disorder is insufficient.”DSM VGrissom instructed his attorneys not to speak to the press, so Hird refused to comment directly for this story. However, reflecting on a recent speech he gave to the parole board, Hird critiqued the state’s failures when it comes to addressing mental health issues more broadly.“Oklahoma has not done enough for its mentally ill, and many fall through the cracks,” he said. “From what I hear, this is currently trending in the wrong direction, which will have costly consequences.”The Evidence Before the BoardPrevious attempts to cite brain damage in Grissom’s case, introduced only after the jury recommended capital punishment, tended to focus on whether an impairment or condition was connected to, or explained, Grissom’s crime.Welty said explanations shouldn’t matter one way or the other.“The Supreme Court held in the Atkins case that people with what’s now called intellectual disability are categorically exempt from the death penalty,” Welty said. “There doesn’t have to be a connection to the crime. It’s a categorical rule that if a person meets the diagnostic criteria, they are not eligible for the death penalty.”At the clemency hearing, lawyers for the attorney general’s office did not contest Grissom’s brain damage, apart from briefly arguing that a defense expert failed to conduct tests to determine whether Grissom was faking disability.The defense responded that such tests were unnecessary; experts could clearly see Grissom’s damage on the brain scans.In the Q-and-A session that followed testimony, board member Kevin Buchanan was still looking for an explanation. He asked where in the defense presentation it indicated that people with head injuries were likely to kill. He did not dispute the evidence of brain damage, but seemed intimidated by the amount of clinical evidence in the defense materials.“There’s a lot of medical in there,” he said, before voting to deny clemency.Welty agreed with a bleak proposition: Grissom’s economic status likely played a role in the failure of his appeals.“The vast majority of people who face capital prosecutions are indigent and eligible for court-appointed counsel,” he said.Not everyone can afford a robust legal defense.Regardless of whether Grissom is executed on March 20, that may be the broader point to understand.Alabama attorney Bryan Stevenson, author of the bestseller “Just Mercy,” which chronicles the death row work of the organization he founded, the Equal Justice Initiative, has lashed out at widespread reluctance to protect the intellectually disabled or to adequately define the condition.“The Supreme Court has banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but states like Alabama refused to assess in any honest way whether the condemned are disabled,” Stevenson wrote. “We’re supposed to sentence people fairly after fully considering their life circumstances, but instead we exploit the inability of the poor to get the assistance they need — all so we can kill them with less resistance.” JC Hallman is a Tulsa-based contributor to Oklahoma Watch. Contact him at jchallman@gmail.com.The post Competent to Die: State’s Arbitrary IQ Rule Defies Scientific Recommendation appeared first on Oklahoma Watch. ...read more read less