The Supreme Court has agreed to take on a case out of Kentucky, where a mentally disabled man was convicted of the death penalty. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), that executing a criminal with mental disabilities violates the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment. Now, the Court has agreed to hear arguments about whether a mentally disabled person can waive a claim of mental disability, Kentucky v. White, Case No. 20-240.
Let two implications of the Court’s decision to hear arguments on this case sink in. First, the Court had based its Atkins decision on the theory that persons with mental disabilities would not be deterred from committing a capital crime, since they would not understand the ramifications of being subject to the death penalty because of their limited mental capacity. Second, the Court found that society should only demand retribution from those who understood the seriousness of their heinous crimes, and persons with mental disabilities would lake that understanding. If an execution will not further the goals of retribution and deterrence, then it is to be deemed cruel and unusual punishment. That does beg the question: if the criminal cannot understand the serious of his or her crime, how could the criminal have sufficient mental capacity to waive this defense? The Court should be embarrassed to even consider the Catch-22 posed by prosecutors, i.e. that a defendant can be so mentally incapacitated that the defendant should not be executed, but that same defendant must have sufficient mental capacity to proactively waive the right not to be executed.
The second implication of this case is how barbaric it is that the United States is still trying to defend capital punishment. Executing someone is so obviously cruel and unusual that, to deem such actions constitutional, the Court must create limited exceptions and attenuated justifications to the Eighth Amendment proscriptions in order to find any execution constitutional in the 21st Century. That this is an issue that needs a Supreme Court decision shows how picayune are capital punishment standards. This case is nothing more than an attempt by prosecutors to create a “gotcha”–if you are too mentally disabled to know your rights, and you end up with an incompetent attorney because that’s all you could afford on your disability benefits, then prosecutors will have a means to kill you notwithstanding the Eighth Amendment. This would be like claiming you are an environmentalist tree hugger, but then you develop a sufficiently long list of reasons why every tree in that forest can be cut down. The Court should stop trying to rationalize the killing of any person by the government via the exceptions to the Eighth Amendment it is asked to craft, and simply find that every such exception does not create a justifiable basis for circumventing the clear language of the Eighth Amendment. Capital punishment should once and for all be deemed unconstitutional, whether one is old or young, intelligent or impaired, sane or insane, wealthy or poor, White or a Person of Color, etc. etc.
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