Top Court to Review Execution of Mentally Retarded

WASHINGTON, March 26 (AP) - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Constitution bars the execution of mentally retarded people as ``cruel and unusual'' punishment.

The court said it will hear an appeal by North Carolina death-row inmate Ernest McCarver, whose execution the justices halted this month just hours before he was to be put to death.

The justices are scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday on a case involving a Texas death-row inmate whose lawyers say he is mentally retarded and has the mind of a 7-year-old. However, the justices are not being asked in that case to decide whether the Constitution prohibits executing the mentally retarded.

In the Texas case, Johnny Paul Penry's lawyers contend jurors who sentenced him to death for murder did not have the chance to properly consider his mental capacity. The Supreme Court used Penry's case in 1988 to rule that the Constitution allows the execution of mentally retarded killers, although the court threw out his first conviction.

McCarver, 40, was convicted of the January 1987 stabbing and choking death of Woodrow Hartley, a 71-year-old worker at the Concord cafeteria where McCarver had worked.

McCarver's lawyers say he is mentally retarded and has the mind of a 10-year-old child and reads at a third-grade level.

His appeal asks whether ``national standards have evolved such that executing a mentally retarded man would violate'' the Constitution's 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

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