Culture, Testing, and the Death Penalty

Is it ethical to execute inmates with intellectual disabilities? If their IQ is low enough, no.

At least this was what the Supreme Court ruled in 2002. Atkins v. Virginia set a new precedent, making it illegal for a defendant to be sentenced to death if he or she has an IQ below 70. Executing those with intellectual disabilities was seen to violate the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

But how can we fairly administer such a high-stakes IQ test in the context of cultural diversity? In a recent CCSRE Faculty Seminar Series talk, Dr. Antonio Puente, Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) and 2017 President of the American Psychological Association, discussed the role of clinical neuropsychology in these cases. He regularly serves as an expert witness and administers evaluations with life and death consequences. Using Hispanics as his case, Dr. Puente presented his nuanced strategy for grappling with rulings that insist on black and white numerical answers.

As a Cuban and former undocumented immigrant, Dr. Puente recounted his experience taking the IQ test as a child. Unable to speak English, he failed. His score now, however, is nearly perfect. In part, he joked, because he wrote the test. Puente received such drastically different scores, not only because he wrote the exam, but because he took it at different stages in his life. These scores are subjective, context-specific, and culturally-specific.

Puente and his colleagues also wrote the ethical guidelines for such testing, “A test [or evaluation] that is fair does not unduly advantage or disadvantage certain examinees because of individual characteristics that are irrelevant to the construct being measured” (AERA). Evaluating fairness requires qualitative analysis to understand how questions are interpreted. As he recalled, “When I asked a mother in a rural village whether her son could hold a conversation for 15 minutes, she responded ‘How long is 15 minutes?’”. Only through field immersion can we begin to understand how and why an immigrant might do poorly or well on an IQ exam. And in turn, we must translate the test into one that is culturally-relevant.

Dr. Puente raised fundamental questions about the role of testing: Is Neuropsychological testing nothing more than measuring power constructs? Are these tests developed by a cross-sample of the population we seek to understand and serve or by those who seek to preserve the intellectual status quo? The self-identified social justice neuropsychologist challenged this intellectual imperialism and ended with a call to academics—to not only seek internal validity among other academics, but to also foster external validity, outside one’s professional community. He emphasized the importance of scientific integrity, the value of a case study approach, and working from one’s specialty in applying scholarship to promote justice.

Elisa Kim

CCSRE Graduate Fellow

PhD Student in Sociology