Tomas Gallo, sentenced to death 20 years ago in Texas for killing his girlfriend's daughter, will not be executed. Instead, he will spend the rest of his life in prison after the state's highest criminal court commuted his capital sentence to life imprisonment.
At the trial, Gallo's defense tried unsuccessfully to convince the jurors that he suffered from an intellectual disability. Two years earlier, the Supreme Court had prohibited the death penalty for people with this disability because the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. The Texas State Board of Psychological Examiners had already sanctioned Denkowski and even prohibited him from evaluating people for the death penalty. The defense cited the testimony of George Denkowski, a psychologist who examined Gallo at the time and whose conclusion turned out to be false after determining that the convicted man's IQ must be higher than what he obtained in the tests to which he submitted. He submitted, in part, because he was Hispanic, according to court records cited by the Texas Tribune.