EXPOSURE TO LIGHT
Mentally Retarted on Death Row
Jennifer Lindberg of The Texas Observer
AUSTIN, TEXAS
When Doil Lane, forty-one, confessed to the 1980 rape and murder of eight-year-old Bertha Martinez, he crawled into the lap of the Texas Ranger who was interrogating him. At the trial, Lane’s defense attorney argued that, because Lane’s I.Q. was in the fifty to sixty-four range (seventy and below, with other limited abilities, is generally considered legally retarded), the state should not execute him. The judge and jury were not persuaded.
Jennifer Lindberg, a free-lance photographer whose work has appeared
in Marie Claire and US Weekly, photographed Lane for The Texas
Observer through the Plexiglas divider in the prison visiting
room, part of a series of portraits of mentally retarded inmates
on death row.
For Lindberg, the project was a revelation. “I wasn’t aware how prevalent the execution of the mentally retarded is,” she said in early June. It is hard to measure such things, but her work may have contributed to the public shift that led to the Supreme Court’s late June decision to ban such executions.
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