Harvard Law and Policy Review: High Court Still Fumbling Over Executions of Intellectually Disabled

Atkins v. Virginia, Frank Housh, Hall v. Florida, Justice Samuel Alito. June 2, 2014

by Frank Housh, owner of Housh Law Offices, PLLC, and chair of the ACS Western New York Lawyer Chapter. He participated in the preparation of the petition for a writ of certiorari in Johnson v. Texas, 509 US 350 (1993), a case related to the issue of the intellectual capacity of the defendant in a capital case.

The Supreme Court’s May 27 decision in Hall v. Florida makes clear that fundamental notions of human dignity and the validity of the scientific method axiomatic in developed nations of the 21st Century have found no purchase by the majority of the Court. As a nation which still executes its own, the United States remains a peculiar outlier in the international order; the fact that our constitutional jurisprudence still tinkers with the obsolete machinery of death drags down the rule of law below the minimum standards of the world community.

In 1989, a 5-4 Supreme Court in Atkins v. Virginia held that executing the “mentally retarded” was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. “Ment…