Atkins v. Virginia

Not to be confused with Atkins, Virginia.

Atkins v. Virginia
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 20, 2002 Decided June 20, 2002
Full case name	Daryl Renard Atkins, Petitioner v. Virginia
Citations	536 U.S. 304 (more) 122 S. Ct. 2242; 153 L. Ed. 2d 335; 2002 U.S. LEXIS 4648; 70 U.S.L.W. 4585; 2002 Cal. Daily Op. Service 5439; 2002 Daily Journal DAR 6937; 15 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 397
Argument	Oral argument
Case history
Prior	Defendant convicted, York County Virginia Circuit Court; affirmed in part, reversed in part, remanded, 510 S.E.2d 445 (Va. 1999); defendant resentenced, York County Circuit Court; affirmed, 534 S.E.2d 312 (Va. 2000); cert. granted, 533 U.S. 976 (2001).
Subsequent	Remanded to Circuit Court, 581 S.E.2d 514 (Va. 2003)
Holding
A Virginia law allowing the execution of mentally disabled individuals violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments. Supreme Court of Virginia reversed and remanded.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy David Souter · Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg · Stephen Breyer
Case opinions
Majority	Stevens, joined by O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer
Dissent	Rehnquist, joined by Scalia, Thomas
Dissent	Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, Thomas
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. VIII
This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
Penry v. Lynaugh

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.

Background

The Eighth Amendment standard for cruel and unusual punishment, as stated by the 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 when they decided the death penalty was an unconstitutionally disproportionate punishment for the crime of raping an adult woman. Later, in Penry v. Lynaugh the Court found there was insufficient objective evidence of a national consensus against executing the intellectually disabled.

In 1986, Georgia was 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

Around midnight on August 16, 1996, following a day spent together by 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. At gunpoint, they forced Nesbitt to withdraw $200 from a nearby ATM. The two abductors then drove Nesbitt to an isolated location where Nesbitt was shot eight times and killed as he pleaded for his life.

A deal of life imprisonment was negotiated with Jones in return for his testimony against Atkins. The jury decided that Jones's version of events was more coherent and credible, and it convicted Atkins of capital murder.

Atkins's criminal history began in early adolescence. When he was thirteen he was convicted of breaking and entering and petty larceny. He started using drugs in eighth grade. He was convicted of grand larceny was he was seventeen. In the months leading to Nesbitt's murder he had committed armed robberies and hit someone over the head with a bottle. Just two weeks before the murder he held a pistol to a woman's head, knocked her down and, apparently on an impulse, shot her in the stomach.

Atkins's school records showed that he repeated second grade, received bad grades through seventh grade, failed all his classes in eighth grade, and was moved on to the ninth grade even though he didn't meet the requirements. Although his school performance improved after he was placed in a class for "slow learners" he never finished high school.

Atkins was sentenced to death by a jury. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed his conviction but reversed the death sentence on appeal finding that the sentencing judge had used an improper sentencing verdict form. At the second sentencing hearing psychologist Stanton Samenow testified for the prosecution that Atkins was of "average intelligence at least". The prosecution also presented testimony about Atkins's criminal history including his 16 prior felony convictions. He 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

Majority opinion

When Penry was decided only two states exempted the intellectually disabled from death penalty eligibility. That number had increased to 18 by the time Atkins was decided. Although 18 was not a majority of the 38 death penalty states, the Court said the "consistency of direction of change" toward a prohibition on the execution of intellectually disabled people and the relative rarity of such executions, supported their finding that a "national consensus has developed against it." This determination was accompanied by a footnote stating that a "broader social and professional consensus" provides "additional evidence" of a national consensus. The dissenters objected to broadening the analysis to include this "additional evidence".

The Eighth Amendment requires that criminal punishments are proportionate. 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 Coker v. Georgia the Court explained that punishments are unconstitutionally disproportionate if they don't advance legitimate penological purposes or are disproportionate to the severity of the crime.

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 the recognized penological goals of retribution and deterrence, doing so is nothing more than "purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering", making the death penalty cruel and unusual in those cases.

In Enmund v. Florida the Court explained that the death penalty would serve a deterrent purpose "only when murder is the result of premeditation and deliberation". The Atkins Court says cognitive and behavioral impairments not only diminish moral culpability, they also make it less likely that defendants will be able to control their impulsive conduct:

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

As for retribution, society's interest in seeing that a criminal get his "just deserts" means that the death penalty must be confined to murders that reflect "a consciousness materially more 'depraved' than the average murderer. The goal of retribution is not served by imposing the death penalty on a group of people with a significantly lesser capacity to understand why they are being executed.

Because intellectually disabled people cannot communicate with the same sophistication as the average offender, there is a greater likelihood that their deficiency in communicative ability will be interpreted by juries as a lack of remorse for their crimes. They typically make poor witnesses and are more prone to suggestion and willing to "confess" to placate or please their questioner. Thus, there is a greater risk that the jury may impose the death penalty despite the existence of evidence that suggests that a lesser penalty should be imposed. In light of the "evolving standards of decency" that the Eighth Amendment demands, the fact that the goals of retribution and deterrence are not served as well in the execution of intellectually disabled people, and the heightened risk that the death penalty will be imposed erroneously, the Court concluded that the Eighth Amendment forbids the execution of intellectually disabled people.

Dissents

Dissenting opinions were written by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The Chief Justice said that "foreign laws, the views of professional and religious organizations, and opinion polls" were not "objective indicia of contemporary values" under the Court's existing precedents.

Justice Antonin Scalia said there was no clear national consensus to exempt the intellectually disabled from death penalty eligibility and agreed with the Chief Justice that the amici cited to provide "additional evidence" of a national consensus were irrelevant. Scalia commented in his dissent that "seldom has an opinion of this court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members."

Subsequent Supreme Court decisions

Twelve years after its Atkins decision the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed in Hall v. Florida (2014) the discretion under which U.S. states can designate an individual convicted of murder as too intellectually incapacitated to be executed. The Court laid down as a legal rule that "if the individual claiming intellectual incapacity has an IQ score that falls somewhere between 70 and 75, then that individual's lawyers must be allowed to offer additional clinical evidence of intellectual deficit, including, most importantly, the inability to learn basic skills and [to] adapt how to react to changing circumstances."

In Moore v. Texas (2017) the Supreme Court stated although the states have the primary responsibility for "the task of developing appropriate ways to enforce" the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of executing intellectually disabled persons, that states must closely take into account the most recent medical guide on intellectual disabilities. "A diagnosis of intellectual disability requires three things: 1) significantly subaverage intellectual functioning (typically measured by an IQ score roughly two standard deviations below the mean); 2) adaptive-functioning deficits; and 3) an onset during childhood, before reaching 18. As the court recognized in Hall v. Florida (2014), intellectual disability is a condition, not an IQ score, and proper diagnosis thus places great emphasis on the second requirement, related to adaptive functioning." The Court further decided that instead of stereotypes, science should govern death penalty cases involving intellectually-disabled prisoners and that courts should base their decisions on opinions of professional organizations like the American Psychological Association.

Subsequent developments for Daryl Atkins

A jury in Virginia decided in July 2005 that Atkins was intelligent enough to be executed on the basis that the constant contact he had with his lawyers provided intellectual stimulation and raised his IQ above 70, making him competent to be put to death under Virginia law. The prosecution had argued that his poor school performance was caused by his use of alcohol and drugs and that his lower scores in earlier IQ tests were tainted.

In January 2008, Circuit Court Judge Prentis Smiley, who was revisiting the matter of whether Atkins was mentally disabled, received allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. Those allegations, if true, would have authorized a new trial for Atkins. After two days of testimony on the matter, Smiley determined that prosecutorial misconduct had occurred. At that juncture, Smiley could have vacated Atkins's conviction and ordered a new trial. Instead, Smiley determined the evidence was overwhelming that Atkins had participated in a felony murder and commuted Atkins's sentence to life in prison.

Prosecutors sought writs of mandamus and prohibition in the Virginia Supreme Court on the matter, claiming that Smiley had exceeded his judicial authority with his ruling. On June 4, 2009, the Virginia Supreme Court, in a 5-2 decision authored by Chief Justice Leroy R. Hassell Sr., ruled that neither mandamus nor prohibition was available to overturn the court's decision to commute the sentence. Justice Cynthia D. Kinser, joined by Justice Donald W. Lemons, considered the two most conservative justices of the Court, wrote a lengthy dissent that was highly critical of both the majority's reasoning and the action of the circuit court in commuting the sentence.

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court decisions on capital punishment
• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 536
• List of United States Supreme Court cases
• Bigby v. Dretke
• Hall v. Florida – 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case limiting the death penalty in the wake of Atkins v. Virginia
• Monster (Walter Dean Myers novel)

External links

• Text of Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002) is available from: Cornell Findlaw Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)
• Transcript of oral argument
• Information about Atkins from the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-capital punishment clearinghouse
• "Killer's fate hanging on his IQ" at BBC News
• Information about applying Atkins from the American Psychiatric Association
• Amicus brief of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation
• Amicus brief of the American Association on Mental Retardation
• Virginia Supreme Court Opinion in Atkins v. Commonwealth including dissents of Hassell and Koontz
• Blog entry from the Daily Kos