Court Error Newly Discovered Evidence.

Byline: Derek Hawkins

7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Bruce Carneil Webster v. T.J. Watson, Warden,

Case No.: 19-2683

Officials: KANNE, HAMILTON, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Court Error Newly Discovered Evidence

In 1996 the federal district court in Fort Worth, Texas sentenced Bruce Webster to death for the murder two years earlier of a 16-year-old girl. Ever since Webster has sought relief from that sentence on the same ground he advanced at trialthat he is intellectually disabled. His efforts gained traction in 2009, when his lawyers came upon records dating to 1994 from the Social Security Administration showing that three different doctors found him intellectually disabled. That development sparked a renewed effort to secure relief in this circuit because Webster is housed in the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. In 2015, sitting en banc, we held that Webster was not barred by the limitations imposed on successive requests for post-conviction relief from seeking to show that he is ineligible for the death penalty based on newly discovered evidence. Webster v. Daniels, 784 F.3d 1123, 113940 (7th Cir. 2015). We remanded to allow the district court to determine whether the Social Security records constituted newly discovered evidencea question turning on whether the records were "previously existing evidence of [Webster's] intellectual disability...