Stupid Is As Stupid Does

From Grits for Breakfast, Dr. George Denkowski was the prosecutor’s favorite forensic psychologist down Texas way, given that the Supreme Court’s Atkins decision precluded executing defendants who were mentally retarded.  From Renee Feltz at the Texas Observer :


After the Atkins decision in 2002, Denkowski became the first choice for Texas prosecutors. He would ultimately testify in 29 cases—nearly two-thirds of such appeals in Texas to date. …

In 29 cases, Denkowski has found defendants retarded only eight times. By 2006, when he tested Plata, Denkowski had garnered an “almost Dr. Death status” among defense lawyers, according to attorney Robert Morrow. Morrow represented Alfred DeWayne Brown during his 2004 trial for killing a clerk and a security guard at a Houston check-cashing store. Morrow said “Denkowski pretty much thought that if you had engaged in criminal behavior you were not retarded,” Morrow says. Brown remains on Death Row.

Like most things scientific, it’s assumed that intelligence testing is inherently accurate and reliable.  To the contrary, it’s particularly susceptible to the will of the person administering the test, and Denkowski was just the man for the job if you wanted to make sure a defendant was executable.

That is, until the case of Daniel Plata, on death row for 12 years before “a federal judge found that Denkowski had improperly inflated IQ scores and all of his testimony ‘must be disregarded due to fatal errors.’ ”  This exposed Denkowski’s massive and systemic deception to his peers.



After the judge rejected Denkowski’s findings in the Plata case, Brown enlisted Jack Fletcher and a Florida-based psychologist named Tom Oakland to jointly file a complaint against Denkowski. Oakland co-authored the adaptive-behavior test. Their complaint cited the Richard case, as well as those of Plata and DeWayne Brown.


Last February, the state Board of Examiners of Psychologists upheld the complaint, finding that Denkowski had made “administration, scoring and mathematical errors” in all three cases. The board sent the complaint to the State Office of Administrative Hearings. Denkowski will have a chance to defend himself in a hearing scheduled for Feb. 16 in Austin. He could lose his license.


The broader psychological community has also rejected Denkowski’s methods. He is mentioned by name in the 2010 edition of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities’ diagnostic manual. In a section about how cultural or economic factors should impact scores on adaptive behavior tests, the authors “strongly caution against practices such as those recommended by Denkowski.”


And who, you ask, was the attorney who both saved Daniel Plata from execution and exposed Denkowski as a fraud?


Daniel Plata’s lawyer, Kathryn Kase, [who] argues that all of the appeals on which Denkowski worked should be re-heard. “When you have junk science in a case, it’s like pouring poison into a punch bowl,” she says. “You aren’t going to get the poison out. So you have to pour out the punch, clean the bowl, and start all over again.”
Our very own ginger-girl, formerly of Albany, New York, and possibly the best president the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers ever had, Kathryn Kase.  Doesn’t it figure that it would be some transplanted New York lawyer who would go down to Texas and ruin all their fun executing mentally retarded defendants whose intelligence was falsely inflated just to make sure that they could be put to death?

Congratulations, Kathryn.  Great work.

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