Topeka ? State legislators met today to consider changes to Kansas law that are designed to protect from the death penalty people with severe mental disabilities who commit murder.

“Kansas should not put people with significant cognitive disabilities to death,” Rocky Nichols, executive director of the Kansas Advocacy and Protective Services, said. “Life in prison without parole is enough,” he said.

A House-Senate Judiciary Committee is considering how the death penalty law considers defendants who say they are mentally retarded.

Kansas law exempts the mentally retarded from the death penalty, but how and when the law determines if a person is mentally retarded during a capital-murder trial are in question.

A 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared that executing a mentally retarded person was unconstitutionally cruel and inhuman.

The House-Senate committee will make a recommendation on the state law for the full Legislature that meets in January.

For more on this story, pick up a copy of Tuesday’s Journal-World.