EXECUTION OF MENTALLY CHALLENGED PERSONS This r

This research paper discusses the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court concerning the constitutionality of executing mentally challenged persons.

Ever since the Court first applied the Eighth Amendment to ban the use of the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), a centrist majority on the Court has slowly but surely circumscribed the ability of States to execute persons with mental disabilities of various kinds. In Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986), the Court held that the Eighth Amendment barred the execution of insane persons; however, it fell short of requiring that the States hold a full evidentiary hearing to determine their sanity. In Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302 (1989), the Court reversed the death sentence meted out to a mentally retarded convicted murderer but at the same time it refused to rule that the execution of such persons per se violated the Eighth Amendment. That holding was, however, reversed in Atkins v. Virginia (June 20, 2002), No. 00-8452, where the Court found that a national consensus existed against the execution of the mentally retarded. The Court has only partially ruled on some peripheral areas, such as the constitutionality of state laws calling for the administration of antipsychotic drugs to death row inmates to render them mentally competent for their execution, and the admissability of evidence of intoxication as a factor mitigating the imposition of the death penalty.

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id schizophrenic to proceed. In Provenzano v. State, 760 So.2d 137 (Fla. 2000), a convicted murderer was executed even though the evidence showed that he believed for more than 20 years that he was Jesus Christ and was for that reason being executed. In 1991, then Governor Bill Clinton refused to grant clemency to Ricky Rector, a death row inmate who had blown off the front three inches of his brain in a suicide attempt and on whom state surgeons performed a frontal lobotomy. The U. S. Supreme Court failed to grant him a stay of execution. Rector v. Bryant, 501 U.S. 1239 (1991). Rector was executed in 1992. If death penalty litigation is not to go on indefinitely, there is much to be said for Rehnquist's argument that a narrow definition of sanity for purposes of last minute sanity trials should be used. That point of view assumes, however, that capital defendants have in practice the same legal avenues to establish their mental condition that they have in theory. In state and federal courts, when defense counsel claims a criminal defendant suffers from a mental disorder, the court must determine whether he or she is mentally competent to stand trial. According to Ream, as of 1990, 78 percent of current death row inmates were ne
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Approximate Word count = 4835
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)