USA - North Carolina. Clinton Cebert Smith has been removed from North Carolina's death row after Superior Court Judge John R. Jolly Jr. ruled ha is mentally retarded

Clinton Cebert Smith has been removed from North Carolina's death row after Superior Court Judge John R. Jolly Jr. ruled the man wasn't capable of understanding his actions and under state law, those who are mentally retarded cannot be executed. Smith will now serve life without the possibility of parole. The Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham said Smith is the 14th prisoner removed from death row in North Carolina since the law was changed in 2001. Executions of the mentally retarded were banned in 2002 by the U.S. Supreme Court. Smith, now 48, was sentenced to death in 1998 in Halifax County for killing his 6-year-old daughter, Britteny. Smith's two younger children survived. Court records show Smith went to Sylvia Cotton's apartment while no one was there and put a pesticide in Kool-Aid in the refrigerator and Cotton served it for supper on January 16, 1996. He has denied poisoning the children, but prosecutors had contended that Smith didn't want to continue paying child support and was angry at his girlfriend for seeing another man.