Monday, August 13, 2012

Of Mice and Men and Texas Death Row Cases


John Steinbeck’s son has criticized the State of Texas over its use of his father’s fiction in death row cases.

From a piece in the Telegraph...

Texas has been using the mental disability of Lennie Small, the Nobel prize-winning author's fictional character in Of Mice and Men, to define learning difficulties and thus to justify its execution of Marvin Wilson, who was put on death row for the 1992 murder of a police informant. 
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v Virginia banning the execution of the mentally disabled, Wilson, who had an IQ of 61, was killed by lethal injection yesterday.
The Texas Court refused to grant a stay of execution by claiming the defendant was not mentally disabled. 
In a statement, Steinbeck's son Thomas Steinbeck, an author himself, said that if his father were alive today, he would be “deeply angry and ashamed to see his work used in this way.” He called the situation "insulting, outrageous, ridiculous and profoundly tragic."


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