On June 20 the Supreme Court in a 6-3 vote ruled that executing individuals who are mentally disabled is a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution that bars "cruel and unusual punishment." The decision reverses the court’s 1989 ruling, where the justices then argued that "there is insufficient evidence of a national consensus" from which to conclude that such executions violated the country’s "evolving standards of decency."

Since that time the number of states prohibiting the execution of mentally retarded prisoners rose from 2 to 18. The current ruling comes in the case of Daryl Atkins, a Virginia inmate, but will affect scores of death-row prisoners in the 20 states that still allow such executions to take place.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, some 35 mentally retarded individuals have been executed since the court permitted states to resume capital punishment in 1976. Human Rights watch, another anti-death penalty group, says there are 200 to 300 retarded inmates among the death row population of more than 3,700 persons.

The case addressed mildly mentally retarded people, defined as having an IQ of between 50 and 70. The court majority said that a mentally disabled person’s "impairments can jeopardize the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings against mentally retarded defendants." As a footnote, Justice Stevens pointed to the cases of two mentally retarded death row inmates who "confessed" to murders that were later disproved with DNA evidence.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas opposed the majority decision. Scalia read his opinion from the bench, something reserved for times when a justice strongly disagrees with the majority. Scalia said the ruling had contrived an "artificial" national consensus. "Seldom has an opinion of this court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members," he wrote.

The execution of mentally retarded people received its most notorious promotion in 1992 when William Clinton, during the Democratic primary race for U.S. president, flew to Arkansas to personally oversee the state killing of Ricky Ray Rector, who was mentally disabled.  
 
Bars judge-only death sentences
In the second Supreme Court case, the justices voted 7-2 on June 24 that Ari–zona’s death-sentencing law violates the defendants’ constitutional right to a trial by jury. This ruling repudiated the court’s 1990 decision that at the time upheld Arizona’s death penalty law.

The court in effect ruled that the decision to impose capital punishment on an individual must be made by a jury, not a judge. Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the right to a jury trial "would be senselessly diminished if it encompassed the fact-finding necessary to increase a defendant’s sentence by two years, but not the fact-finding necessary to put him to death."

Under Arizona’s death penalty law judges alone decide whether a convicted individual should be sentenced to death. Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Nebraska have similar laws. Together with Arizona they have a combined death row population of 168.

This decision also puts in question the laws in four other states--Alabama, Delaware, Florida, and Indiana--where the judge decides between life and death after hearing a jury’s recommendation. These five states have 569 people on death row.

It’s unclear what will happen to the hundreds of prisoners affected by this ruling. Some "inmates’ sentences could be commuted to life in prison," noted an Associated Press dispatch on the decision, "or the inmates could be resentenced, with some receiving death sentences all over again."  
 
 
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