Mental Retardation

California prosecutors and defense attorneys recently agreed that Calvin Coleman, Jr., a man sentenced to death for murder in 1980, is mentally retarded and therefore exempt from capital punishment. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 decision that declared execution of mentally retarded individuals unconstitutional (Atkins v. Virginia), California modified its laws in 2005 to conform to the ruling. Coleman is the first person about whom both the prosecution and the defense agreed that he met the conditions.

Arkansas’ leading advocacy organization for people with mental retardation, Arc Arkansas, delivered a letter to Governor Mike Beebe and the Arkansas Parole Board urging clemency for Frank Williams, Jr. because of his mental retardation. He is scheduled for execution on September 9 and the Arkansas Parole Board is holding a clemency hearing on his case on August 4. The letter notes that executing a mentally retarded person is unconstitutional based on both Arkansas’ 1993 statutory ban and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia.

Prof. John Blume of Cornell University Law School has compiled the cases in which an inmate's death sentence was reduced because of a finding of mental retardation. His research revealed 83 such reversals since 2002. In Atkins v. Virginia (2002), the U.S. Supreme Court held that it is unconstitutional to apply the death penalty to defendants with mental retardation. The Court did not, however, establish a definition for mental retardation or determine the procedures for proving a claim of retardation. Some states have not yet passed legislation to determine this process.

Earl Berry is scheduled to be executed on May 21 in Mississippi, despite evidence that he has mental retardation. Judicial review of this evidence has been denied because his former lawyers failed to file the evidence in a timely fashion. This would be the second execution since the U.S. Supreme Court approved Kentucky's method of lethal injection on April 16. Last month, a psychologist concluded that Berry had an IQ of 75 or below and “significantly sub-average intellectual functioning and … meets the criteria to be classified as mentally retarded.” The U.S.

Kennedy Brewer, who spent almost 15 years on Mississippi’s death row for the 1992 murder and rape of his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter, has been exonerated of the charges, and another man, Justin Johnson, has been arrested for the same crime. A 2001 investigation by the Innocence Project found that the semen on the victim’s body did not match Brewer’s DNA, but did match Johnson’s. Johnson was a suspect early in the case, and his blood was collected and preserved in the Mississippi State Crime Laboratory for more than 10 years.