Criminal
Jun. 22, 2002
Court Bans Execution Of Mentally Retarded
WASHINGTON - In a historic decision reversing a quarter-century of death penalty jurisprudence, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the execution of mentally retarded defendants is cruel and unusual punishment that violates the Constitution.
The 6-3 decision carves out an exception to the death penalty. It affects immediately the 20 states - including California - that allow execution of the mentally retarded, but leaves the states to define mental retardation and the procedures to be followed in such cases.
Lawyers on both sides of the issue predicted a period of confusion and further litigation to hammer out these issues. Legislators in California - with a national high of 624 inmates on death row - and the other states also will be under pressure to adopt legal standards to comply with the decision. (See related story, Page 10.)
Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said that in the 13 years since the court upheld execution of the mentally retarded, a national "consensus" has developed that "such executions are cruel and unusual punishments prohibited by the Eighth Amendment."
In 1989, only two states that used capital punishment banned it for the mentally retarded, but 18 states now do so, Stevens said. "It is not so much the number of these states that is significant, but the consistency of the direction of [the] change," he said.
"This legislative judgment reflects a broader social and professional consensus," Stevens added, citing amicus briefs from the American Psychological Association, "widely diverse religious communities in the United States" and the "world community," as well as polls of Americans.
Stevens said it was important to protect the rights of mentally retarded defendants because "they 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." Atkins v. Virginia, 2002 DJDAR 6937 (U.S. June 20, 2002).
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision.
In his opinion, Rehnquist said "the Court's decision to place weight on foreign laws, the views of professional and religious organizations, and opinion polls ... serves only to illustrate its willingness to proscribe by judicial fiat ... a punishment about which no across-the-board consensus has developed through the workings of normal democratic processes in the laboratories of the States."
Scalia, who read his dissent from the bench, wrote, "Seldom has an opinion of the Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members."
"There is something to be said for popular abolition of the death penalty; there is nothing to be said for its incremental abolition by this Court," Scalia added. "This newest invention promises to be more effective than any of the others in turning the process of capital trial into a game."
The decision spared the life of Daryl Renard Atkins, who was an 18-year-old high school dropout in 1996 when he and a friend were seeking money to buy beer. They abducted a serviceman from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia from the parking lot of a 7-Eleven store, forced him to withdraw money from an ATM machine and then drove him to a deserted area, where they shot him to death.
At trial, one psychiatrist testified that Atkins, with an IQ of 59, was "mildly retarded" and would qualify for Social Security disability payments. Atkins, who had never lived on his own nor held a job, was convicted of being the shooter and sentenced to death.
The Virginia Supreme Court overturned the death penalty on an unrelated issue and ordered him resentenced. At the second proceeding, defense and prosecution psychiatrists gave conflicting assessments of Atkins' mental abilities, and he again was sentenced to death.
The Virginia high court then upheld the death penalty, saying it was "not willing to commute Atkins' sentence of death to life imprisonment merely because of his IQ score."
Thursday's decision returns Atkins' case to the lower court, which must determine the state's claim that Atkins is not retarded.
Death penalty advocates hoping for indications of a broad shift in the court's views of capital punishment were disappointed, however, by a footnote in which Stevens dashed the hopes of lawyers fighting to outlaw the execution of offenders under the age of 18. He noted that since the court in 1989 ruled that there was no national consensus prohibiting the execution of offenders older than age 15, "only two states have raised the threshold age." Petitions seeking to change the justices' mind on this issue are pending before the court.
Nonetheless, advocates of capital punishment hailed Thursday's decision.
Robert E. Hirshon, president of the American Bar Association, said his organization, which filed an amicus brief for Atkins, "applauds" the decision because it "makes clear that justice will not be short-changed on account of a defendant's minimal intellectual capacity."
The ruling "diminishes the risk that some of our most vulnerable criminal defendants will be sentenced to death but does not eliminate it," Hirshon added. "We now must seek better ways to detect and identify undiagnosed mentally retarded offenders subject to the death penalty, and focus on ways to improve the delivery of criminal legal services to them."
Elisabeth Semel, director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California at Boalt Hall, called the decision "a wonderful step in the right direction."
Noting that Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy were part of the majority, she called it significant that the decision was issued "not just by the liberal wing of the court but also the center-right, and that they agreed not only in the outcome but also with the reasoning."
What will happen in California as a result "will depend on whether the Legislature acts before the courts do," Semel said.
"The court does give some guidance with a two-pronged definition [of mental retardation] of both IQ and adaptive functioning, and it seems to focus on an IQ of 70 [as being the maximum for retardation] but doesn't say so in a precise way," she added. "As a result, we may well get cases where the definition of some legislatures doesn't sufficiently protect people in the view of the scientific community."
At the same time, the justices gave no guidance on what procedural mechanisms the states should adopt to protect the mentally retarded.
"Defense attorneys will have to be vigilant in looking for and raising mental retardation, and raising it pretrial, so the case never becomes death-eligible," Semel said. "That decision still could be made later, however, by the jury."
Defense attorneys also "should become educated about mental retardation, do a good investigation [of a defendant's history] and get good experts," Semel said. "There is a lot of masking by people who are trying to appear functional because of the stigma attached to mental retardation, and so the lawyer may not see it."
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said the justices reached a "commendable conclusion."
While the state's courts and juries "have long considered a defendant's mental capacity when determining the appropriate sentence," he added, this decision "provides further guidance on mental retardation as a condition bearing on culpability."
The decision "will present big challenges for prosecutors and defense attorneys, as well as state and federal courts," Lockyer said, adding that "the state's district attorneys use caution and reason in carefully deciding when and whether to prosecute murderers for capital crimes."
Thursday's decision drew strong criticism from death penalty advocates.
"It was a feel-good decision," said Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, which filed an amicus brief for Virginia in the case. "I hope the majority justices feel good that now the states have to do a lot of work to address a problem that doesn't exist."
"Every death row inmate with a phone now can take [an IQ test] and hire a shrink," he added. "This decision will add probably four years to every [capital] claim, and if I were on death row, I would make that claim."
While legislatures will adopt new laws to comply with the decision, "in any case it all will be litigated," he added. "The questions will include what is the proper forum for a [retardation] claim, whether the judge makes the decision and how much evidence is required."
In other decisions Thursday, the justices:
• Ruled unanimously that the American widow of a Guatemalan rebel leader who was tortured and killed in 1993 by Guatemalan troops does not have a constitutional claim of a denial to access to the courts against former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other high-ranking Clinton administration officials. Christopher v. Harbury, 2002 DJDAR 6875 (U.S. June 20, 2002).
Writing for the court, Justice David H. Souter said that Jennifer K. Harbury could not show that officials who allegedly concealed information they had about her husband's capture frustrated any "underlying cause of action that the disruption had compromised."
• Ruled, 7-2, that the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 does not allow students to bring civil rights suits under 42 U.S.C. 1983 against their schools for release of grades and other information. Gonzaga University v. Doe, 2002 DJDAR 6859 (U.S. June 20, 2002).
The decision overturns a jury award of $1.6 million in compensatory and punitive damages to a Washington state man who planned to be a teacher. He charged that Gonzaga University had violated the educational privacy act by releasing to state licensing authorities an unfounded allegation that he had sexually attacked another student.
Writing for the court, Rehnquist said that the act is a "spending statute," which bans only federal funding of educational institutions that have a policy or practice of releasing education records to unauthorized persons. "This court has never held, and declines to do so here, that spending legislation drafted in terms resembling FERPA's can confer enforceable [private] rights," he said.
In dissent, Stevens, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, accused the majority of a "studious avoidance of the rights-creating language in the title and text of the Act."
Stevens added that "the Court's novel attempt to craft a new category of second-class statutory rights is misguided."
• Ruled 5-4 that North Carolina will hold onto a Congressional seat contested by Utah based on Census collection techniques used in 2000. The court, in an opinion by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said the Census bureau may use a technique known as "imputation" to count people in households that census takers were unable to contact. Utah v. Evans 2002 DJDAR 6881 (U.S. June 20, 2002).
David Pike
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