Judge spares killer

Death row inmate mentally retarded

A federal judge has removed a Bladen County man from the state's death row because he is mentally retarded, ruling that he should not be executed for murdering three people in 1984.

Elton O. McLaughlin, 55, is the 12th death row inmate in North Carolina spared because he was found to be mentally retarded. But his case comes with a twist.

In 2001, the legislature outlawed the death penalty for the mentally retarded. Defendants are considered retarded if they score 70 or less on an IQ test and show poor life skills before age 18. State law also requires that the IQ test be "individually administered by a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist."

In McLaughlin's case, some disputed the validity of a test he took at age 10. It showed he had an IQ of 70, but it was given by a teacher.

The state's lawyers argued that the IQ test wasn't properly administered and therefore could not be used as proof that he was mentally retarded. In June 2003, Bladen County Superior Court Judge James F. Ammons Jr. sided with the state, finding no credible evidence that McLaughlin scored an IQ of 70 or less.

Ammons quoted the N.C. Supreme Court's description of McLaughlin as a cold, calculating contract killer.

But U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle noted that what state law requires was not possible in the segregated Bladen County school that McLaughlin attended in the 1960s. The school did not have psychologists to administer IQ tests. To require such conditions now under state law is unfair, Boyle reasoned in his order Jan. 13.

"Where, as in this case, the absence of such a test has been shown to be the result of illegal segregation of the public schools, imposing such a requirement" is inconsistent with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2002, Boyle wrote. The court's ruling in Atkins v. Virginia outlawed the execution of people who are mentally retarded but let states set their own standards for determining retardation.

Sentence vacated

Boyle concluded that McLaughlin "has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that he is mentally retarded." He ordered that McLaughlin's death sentences be vacated and that he serve the rest of his life in prison.

The state's lawyers have not decided whether to appeal.

"It is absolutely a correct ruling based on both the law and the evidence," said McLaughlin's lawyer, Jonathan E. Broun with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham. "Elton McLaughlin was the type of defendant that both Atkins and the North Carolina statute are supposed to protect."

Broun and Chapel Hill lawyer J. Kirk Osborn represent McLaughlin. They say McLaughlin didn't start school until he was 8 years old and was identified as a special-needs student. He reads at a sixth-grade level and does math at a third-grade level.

On IQ tests over the years, McLaughlin has scored between 68 and 76, his lawyers said.

Murder for hire

McLaughlin was sentenced to death for a murder-for-hire plot to kill James Elwell Worley, whose wife, Shelia Worley, wanted him dead. McLaughlin also was sentenced to death for later murdering Shelia Worley because she failed to pay him $3,000 and talked to police. At the same time, McLaughlin killed Worley's 4-year-old daughter, Psoma Baggett.

Eddie Carson Robinson, McLaughlin's co-defendant in all three killings, also has raised a mental retardation claim on appeal but has not had a hearing.

McLaughlin and Robinson are the only two death row inmates prosecuted by Gov. Mike Easley, the former district attorney in Bladen, Brunswick and Columbus counties. An Easley spokeswoman said it would be inappropriate for the governor to comment on the ruling.

Bladen County District Attorney Rex Gore said two juries agreed that McLaughlin should die for the crimes based on the nature of the killings, the number of victims and McLaughlin's prior conviction of involuntary manslaughter for killing another man.

"My main concern with this ruling is how it will affect other mental retardation claims in North Carolina," Gore said. "It appears to me at least to call into question the method we are using to determine mental retardation."