7:02 PM CT — Robert Ladd — Executed By The State Of Texas

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TEXAS —  The inmate, Robert Ladd, was released on parole after serving about a third of his 40-year prison sentence for the fatal stabbing of a Dallas woman whose body was set ablaze in a fire that killed her two children.

Four years later, a mentally impaired woman in East Texas was strangled and beaten with a hammer. Her arms and legs were bound, bedding was placed between her legs, and — like the Dallas woman more than a decade earlier in 1980 — she was set on fire in her apartment.

A Texas criminal court sentenced Ladd to death.

Ladd was just hours away from his execution in 2003 when a federal court agreed to hear evidence suggesting he was intellectually impaired. ACLU attorneys cited a Texas psychiatrist’s diagnosis in 1970 that Ladd was “fairly obviously retarded” with an IQ of 67.

The psychiatrist later reaffirmed his initial determination in an affidavit, stating Ladd’s IQ test and “three separate interviews confirmed my diagnosis of mental retardation,” according to a statement from the ACLU.

But the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court last year, have since denied Ladd’s death penalty appeal, arguing the 57-year-old man doesn’t meet the Texas courts’ standards for determining mental disability, guidelines which haven’t been endorsed by the scientific or medical community.

Ladd is scheduled to die Thursday at 6 p.m. CT. The ACLU petitioned the Supreme Court Wednesday for a stay of execution and to review the ruling, according to the statement.

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