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Responding to the national attention received by the Bowden execution and our decision in Penry, state legislatures across the country began to address the issue. Beyond the empty talk of a ''national consensus,'' the court gives us a brief glimpse of what really underlies today's decision: pretension to a power confined neither by the moral sentiments originally enshrined in the Eighth Amendment (its original meaning) nor even by the current moral sentiments of the American people. The court pronounces the punishment cruel and unusual primarily because 18 states recently have passed laws limiting the death eligibility of certain defendants based on mental retardation alone, despite the fact that the laws of 19 other states besides Virginia continue to leave the question of proper punishment to the individuated consideration of sentencing judges or juries familiar with the particular offender and his or her crime. "Believing this view to be seriously mistaken, I dissent," Rehnquist said, omitting the customary word "respectfully" before "dissent.". Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. The Associated Press contributed to this report. . . The parties have not called our attention to any state legislative consideration of the suitability of imposing the death penalty on mentally retarded offenders prior to 1986. The evidence carries even greater force when it is noted that the legislatures that have addressed the issue have voted overwhelmingly in favor of the prohibition.

from the fact that 18 states -- less than half (47 percent) of the 38 states that permit capital punishment (for whom the issue exists) -- have very recently enacted legislation barring execution of the mentally retarded. WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court will take up a Florida case over how judges should determine if a death row inmate is mentally disabled, and thus ineligible for execution. It was in that year that we decided Penry and concluded that those two state enactments, ''even when added to the 14 states that have rejected capital punishment completely, do not provide sufficient evidence at present of a national consensus.''. It is not so much the number of these states that is significant, but the consistency of the direction of change. Legal Statement. . In 1995, when New York reinstated its death penalty, it emulated the federal government by expressly exempting the mentally retarded. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

I write separately, however, to call attention to the defects in the court's decision to place weight on foreign laws, the views of professional and religious organizations and opinion polls in reaching its conclusion. "The practice ... has become unusual, and it is fair to say that a national consensus has developed against it," Stevens wrote for himself and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. We must never forget that it is a Constitution for the United States of America that we are expounding. And it explains, of course, why the court can be so cavalier about the evidence of consensus. . Market data provided by Factset. The justices, in a 6-3 ruling that reversed a 1989 decision, said that imposing the death penalty on retarded criminals violates their constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. In this case, for instance, the Commonwealth of Virginia disputes that Atkins suffers from mental retardation. Counting the 12 states that do not allow capital punishment at all, 30 states prohibit execution of the retarded. For example, at various times in the country's history it was considered acceptable to flog people in public, or to execute convicted rapists. Moreover, a major factor that the court entirely disregards is that the legislation of all 18 states it relies on is still in its infancy.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion. of 59. I agree with Justice Scalia that the court's assessment of the current legislative judgment regarding the execution of defendants like petitioner more resembles a post hoc rationalization for the majority's subjectively preferred result rather than any objective effort to ascertain the content of an evolving standard of decency. or redistributed.

. Much has changed since then. Our independent evaluation of the issue reveals no reason to disagree with the judgment of ''the legislatures that have recently addressed the matter'' and concluded that death is not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal. The case turned on the 8th Amendment's protection against "cruel and unusual punishments," and how to define those terms today. Now, 18 states prohibit it. Those mentally retarded persons who meet the law's requirements for criminal responsibility should be tried and punished when they commit crimes. His conclusion was based on interviews with people who knew Atkins, a review of school and court records and the administration of a standard intelligence test which indicated that Atkins had a full scale I.Q. Equally irrelevant are the practices of the ''world community,'' whose notions of justice are (thankfully) not always those of our people. Before today, our opinions consistently emphasized that Eighth Amendment judgments regarding the existence of social ''standards'' ''should be informed by objective factors to the maximum possible extent'' and ''should not be, or appear to be, merely the subjective views of individual justices.'' The arrogance of this assumption of power takes one's breath away. Few, if any, of the states have had sufficient experience with these laws to know whether they are sensible in the long term. The court ruled Thursday in favor of a Virginia inmate, Daryl Renard Atkins, who was convicted of shooting an Air Force enlisted man for beer money in 1996. Because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment and control of their impulses, however, they do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct. The decision overturned the Court's 1989 decision in Penry v. Lynaugh. At approximately midnight on Aug. 16, 1996, Atkins and William Jones, armed with a semiautomatic handgun, abducted Eric Nesbitt, robbed him of the money on his person, drove him to an automated teller machine in his pickup truck, where cameras recorded their withdrawal of additional cash, then took him to an isolated location where he was shot eight times and killed. . Additionally, it suggests that some characteristics of mental retardation undermine the strength of the procedural protections that our capital jurisprudence steadfastly guards. All rights reserved. Sign up for Beliefnet's Partner Mail newsletter. The Supreme Court used Penry's case in 1988 to rule that the Constitution allows the execution of mentally retarded killers, although the court threw out his first conviction. . The case is McCarver v. North Carolina, 00-8727. Mike Easley had denied his clemency petition. The court pays lip service to these precedents as it miraculously extracts a ''national consensus'' forbidding execution of the mentally retarded . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper. "It is not so much the number of these states that is significant, but the consistency of the direction of the change," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. Another 12 states do not have capital punishment. In 1988, when Congress enacted legislation reinstating the federal death penalty, it expressly provided that a ''sentence of death shall not be carried out upon a person who is mentally retarded.'' Virginia authorities argued that Atkins planned his crime and understood afterward what he had done. Hours earlier, North Carolina Gov. Some states, for example New Hampshire and New Jersey, continue to authorize executions, but none have been carried out in decades. The Supreme Court halted McCarver's execution on March 1 after he had been served his last meal. The decision is confined to mentally retarded defendants convicted of murder and does not address the constitutionality of capital punishment in general. I agree with the chief justice, (dissenting opinion), that the views of professional and religious organizations and the results of opinion polls are irrelevant. This consensus unquestionably reflects widespread judgment about the relative culpability of mentally retarded offenders and the relationship between mental retardation and the penological purposes served by the death penalty. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, Defense lawyers had asked Easley to commute McCarver's sentence to life in prison. There appear to have been no similar enactments during the next two years, but in 2000 and 2001 six more states -- South Dakota, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri and North Carolina -- joined the procession. ©2020 FOX News Network, LLC. For if it is evidence of a national consensus for which we are looking, then the viewpoints of other countries simply are not relevant. . The texts of the decision and dissents are online at nytimes .com/national. Guided by our approach in these cases, we shall first review the judgment of legislatures that have addressed the suitability of imposing the death penalty on the mentally retarded and then consider reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with their judgment.