USA - Texas. Jose Garcia Briseño has been resentenced to life without parole

Jose Garcia Briseño, whose case was used by the Texas courts to establish a very restrictive definition of mental retardation, has been resentenced to life without parole in Webb County. His sentence was the result of a plea bargain ending years of litigation. Briseño has been on death row for over 20 years, and received a stay of execution in 2009 just 5 days before he was to be executed. Briseño's lawyers have argued he is intellectually disabled, and therefore ineligible for the death penalty, but a Texas court said his crime required forethought, planning, and complex execution, so he was not mentally retarded. No other state uses such non-scientific factors in determining intellectual disability. Recently, the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities criticized the use of these "Briseño factors" in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court: “The Texas impressionistic ‘test’ directs fact-finders to use ‘factors’ that are based on false stereotypes about mental retardation that effectively exclude all but the most severely incapacitated.” (Chester v. Thaler 2012).