A
T LEAST WE finally have liberals on record admitting there is such a thing as IQ.
Six years ago, Eric Nesbitt, a U.S. airman assigned to Langley Air Force Base, was brutally murdered by Daryl Renard
Atkins, a repeat violent criminal. It was a heinous and pointless murder: Atkins already had Nesbitt's money and car when
he unloaded his gun into the defenseless airman. According to a cellmate, Atkins later laughed about the murder.
After hearing the (overwhelming) evidence against him, a jury sentenced Atkins to death.
Last week, the Supreme Court overturned that sentence. The court ruled that the Constitution makes Atkins ineligible for
the death penalty if he can prove he is "retarded." In other words, Atkins avoids his capital sentence if he is at least
smart enough to know how to fail an IQ test.
Consider what "retarded" means in this context. It does not mean that Atkins could not understand the difference between
right and wrong. The law already accounts for that possibility with the concept of legal insanity. It does not mean he
could not assist in his own defense. The law already accounts for that possibility with the concept of legal incompetence.
Nor, incidentally, does it mean that Atkins was so retarded that he could not plan a crime, murder a man and then hide the
gun. (The police never retrieved the murder weapon.) Indeed, the jury heard the evidence that Atkins was retarded, but
still voted to impose the death penalty.
He's just dumb - not an uncommon trait among violent criminals. As far back as 1914, criminologist H.H. Goddard concluded
that "25 percent to 50 percent of the people in our prisons are mentally defective and incapable of managing their affairs
with ordinary prudence." Crimes of violence in particular - murder, rape and assault - are all correlated with low IQs.
Thus, the Supreme Court has now prohibited the death penalty for precisely those people who are most likely to commit
death-penalty level crimes.
As noted in the excellent new book, " Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right," liberals acknowledge the concept of
IQ only when attacking Republican presidential candidates or trying to spring a criminal from death row. The court has
prohibited IQ tests from being used in hiring as a violation of the Civil Rights Act (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.). But to
limit a killer's culpability, IQ tests are evidently completely reliable.
Back when Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's book "The Bell Curve" was released, liberals denounced the idea of
intelligence as a sadistic ploy. Yale University psychologist Robert Sternberg was widely quoted as saying that IQ accounts
for less than 10 percent of the variation in human behavior - including the tendency to commit crimes. "Would you want to
make your entire national policy around something that has less than a 10 percent effect?" No, it turns out - only a
national policy prohibiting the death penalty.
The New York Times made the sophisticated argument that one of the authors of "The Bell Curve" (Murray) was "a political
ideologue." While admitting that "The Bell Curve" had created "an aura of scientific certitude," the Times warned that
other scholars would soon "subject its findings to withering criticism." (Not yet, but soon!) The Times was especially
irritated that the book had "ignored the huge gaps in understanding the precise nature of intelligence" and dismissed
arguments that low test scores proved only "biased testing."
But now liberals are overjoyed that such a biased test purporting to measure "intelligence" - a subject that we don't even
vaguely understand - is going to be used to empty the nation's death rows. In an editorial titled "The Court Gets It
Right," the Times gushed, "there are scores, perhaps even hundreds, of inmates whose low IQs will now qualify them for a
sentence reduction to life in prison."
Now that the topic of "The Bell Curve" is a matter of constitutional law, rather than "pseudo-scientific racism," "indecent,
philosophically shabby and politically ugly," "disingenuous" and "creepy" - all quotes from the liberal New Republic on the
book - let's turn to the guys who were experts in the field before liberals admitted it was a field.
According to "The Bell Curve," the truly retarded are far underrepresented in the criminal population because those with
very low IQs "have trouble mustering the competence to commit most crimes." As Justice Scalia put it in dissent, the
court's portrayal of the retarded as "willfully cruel" does not comport with experience. To the contrary, he said, "being
childlike generally suggests innocence rather than brutality."
But we've got liberals on the record: The New York Times claims that no matter how heinous their behavior, people with low
IQs have "little understanding of their moral culpability."
If IQ is such a reliable predictor of behavior, will liberals finally agree to use it as the sole basis for admission to
University of Michigan Law School? Also, can we get the SAT scores of Times editor Pinch Sulzberger now?