Atkins v. Virginia

Not to be confused with Atkins, Virginia .

Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6–3 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment 's ban on cruel and unusual punishments , but that states can define who has an intellectual disability. At the time Atkins was decided, 18 of the 38 death penalty states exempted mentally disabled offenders from the death penalty.

Twelve years later in _Hall v. Florida _ the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the discretion under which U.S. states can designate an individual convicted of murder as too intellectually incapacitated to be executed.

Contents

• 1 Background

• 2 Case history

• 3 Supreme Court

  • 3.1 Majority opinion

  • 3.2 Dissents

• 4 Reaction

• 5 Subsequent developments

  • 5.1 In the Supreme Court

  • 5.2 On remand

• 6 See also

• 7 Footnotes

• 8 External links

Background

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The Eighth Amendment standard for cruel and unusual punishment , as stated by the Supreme Court in _Weems v United States _, "may acquire meaning as public opinion becomes enlightened by a humane justice". The court expanded this idea of "evolving standards of decency " to death penalty jurisprudence in _Coker v. Georgia _ holding that death sentences are unconstitutionally excessive if they don't advance legitimate penological purposes or are disproportionate to the severity of the crime.

Later, in _Penry v. Lynaugh _ the court found insufficient objective evidence of a national consensus to rule that executing the intellectually disabled was unconstitutional. Concurring in _Penry v. Lynaugh _, Justice William Brennan wrote that the proportionality of a punishment depended on the severity of the injury caused and the defendant's moral culpability.

In 1986, Georgia became the first state to outlaw the execution of intellectually disabled people. Congress followed two years later, and the next year Maryland joined those two jurisdictions. Thus, when the Court confronted the issue in Penry in 1989, the Court could not say that a national consensus against executing intellectually disabled people had emerged. Over the next 12 years, 16 more states exempted intellectually disabled people from capital punishment under their laws, bringing the total number of states to 18, plus the federal government.

Case history

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Around midnight on August 16, 1996, following a day spent together drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana, the 18-year-old Daryl Renard Atkins (born November 6, 1977) and his accomplice, William Jones, walked to a nearby convenience store, where they abducted Eric Nesbitt, an airman from nearby Langley Air Force Base . When they realized Nesbitt was only carrying $60, they drove him to a nearby ATM where footage from a surveillance camera showed them forcing Nesbitt to withdraw another $200. The two abductors then drove Nesbitt to an isolated location where Nesbitt was shot eight times and killed as he pleaded for his life.

Jones would not answer police questions without an attorney present. A deal of life imprisonment was negotiated with Jones in return for his testimony against Atkins. At trial, the jury decided that Jones's version of events was "more coherent and credible", and convicted Atkins of capital murder .

During the sentencing phase the state sought the death penalty. Forensic psychologist Evan Nelson testified that Atkins had an IQ of 59. Nelson said this was "in the range of being mildly mentally retarded". After hearing the testimony, the jury sentenced Atkins to death.

The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed Atkins's conviction, but reversed the death sentence on appeal, finding that the verdict form had not included an option for the jury to impose a life sentence.

At the second sentencing hearing psychologist Stanton Samenow testified that Atkins was of "average intelligence at least". Samenow assessed Atkins's vocabulary and knowledge of current affairs, and testified that he understood cause and effect, and could use relatively complex words like orchestra and decimal. Samenow acknowledged that Atkins's academic performance was "by and large" terrible.

The prosecution also presented testimony about Atkins's criminal history which began in early adolescence and included over a dozen prior felony convictions for robbery, larceny and burglary .

Atkins was sentenced to death a second time. The sentence was affirmed by the Virginia Supreme Court based on a prior Supreme Court decision, _Penry v. Lynaugh _. Justice Cynthia D. Kinser authored the five-member majority. Justices Leroy Rountree Hassell Sr. and Lawrence L. Koontz Jr. authored dissenting opinions. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari "because of the gravity of the concerns expressed by the dissenters" and "in light of the dramatic shift in the state legislative landscape that has occurred in the past 13 years." The Court heard oral arguments in the case on February 20, 2002.

Supreme Court

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Majority opinion

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The "relationship between mental retardation and the penological purposes served by the death penalty" justifies a conclusion that executing intellectually disabled people is cruel and unusual punishment that the Eighth Amendment should forbid. In other words, unless it can be shown that executing the intellectually disabled serves recognized penological goals, doing so is nothing more than "purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering", making the death penalty cruel and unusual in those cases.

Justice Stevens relied on clinical diagnostic criteria to conclude that people with intellectual disability "have diminished capacities to understand and process information, to communicate, to abstract from mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, to control impulses, and to understand the reactions of others". The Atkins Court said cognitive and behavioral impairments not only diminished moral culpability for impulsive conduct, they also made it less likely that defendants would be deterred by the death penalty:

Yet it is the same cognitive and behavioral impairments that make these defendants less morally culpable—for example, the diminished ability to understand and process information, to learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, or to control impulses—that also make it less likely that they can process the information of the possibility of execution as a penalty and, as a result, control their conduct based upon that information

Because intellectually disabled people cannot communicate with the same sophistication as the average offender, there is a

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