In the public interest: intellectual disability, the Supreme Court, and the death penalty

This article deals with a case that recently came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The issues involved whether attorneys provided effective assistance to a person convicted of murder when no mitigating evidence was presented (either strategically or by neglect) to the jury concerning the intellectual disabilities of their client during the death penalty phase of the trial. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that the death penalty for intellectually disabled individuals (mentally retarded) constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In this case the attorneys made a strategic decision not to present possibly mitigating evidence for the death penalty phase. The Supreme Court considered whether the appeals court abdicated its judicial review responsibilities. The results of psychological evaluations are presented, and the decisions of the Supreme Court are discussed.     

Assessing and restoring competency to be executed: Should psychiatrists participate?

Ford v. Wainwright (1986) is one among several recent U. S. Supreme Court decisions granting psychiatrists a distinct but awkward role in the capital punishment process. Ford affirms the right of the condemned to be spared execution while mentally incompetent, and validates state laws requiring psychiatric evaluation and treatment of capital inmates who plead that they have become insane while awaiting execution. The ruling raises troublesome questions for psychiatry, including whether it is ethical for psychiatrists to assess or treat prisoners, thereby enabling their execution. This article argues that evaluation and treatment of capital inmates is in accordance with medical practice standards that emphasize respect for patients' autonomy and rationality.     

The absence of cruelty is not the presence of humanness: physicians and the death penalty in the United States

The death penalty by lethal injection is a legal punishment in the United States. Sodium Thiopental, once used in the death penalty cocktail, is no longer available for use in the United States as a consequence of this association. Anesthesiologists possess knowledge of Sodium Thiopental and possible chemical alternatives. Further, lethal injection has the look and feel of a medical act thereby encouraging physician participation and comment. Concern has been raised that the death penalty by lethal injection, is cruel. Physicians are ethically directed to prevent cruelty within the doctor-patient relationship and ethically prohibited from participation in any component of the death penalty. The US Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is not cruel per se and is not in conflict with the 8th amendment of the US constitution. If the death penalty is not cruel, it requires no further refinement. If, on the other hand, the death penalty is in fact cruel, physicians have no mandate outside of the doctor patient relationship to reduce cruelty. Any intervention in the name of cruelty reduction, in the setting of lethal injection, does not lead to a more humane form of punishment. If physicians contend that the death penalty can be botched, they wrongly direct that it can be improved. The death penalty cocktail, as a method to reduce suffering during execution, is an unverifiable claim. At best, anesthetics produce an outward appearance of calmness only and do not address suffering as a consequence of the anticipation of death on the part of the condemned.     

The aftermath of Ford v. Wainwright

Whatever happened to Alvin Ford? This paper describes the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 1986 ruling in Ford v. Wainwright. The Ford decision held that exempting the mentally incompetent from execution is a matter of constitutional right, and hence the determination of who is competent for execution cannot be left solely in the hands of the executive branch of the government. We describe the hearing in Ford's case in federal district court that occurred after the Supreme Court's decision, the judge's ruling, and Ford's subsequent (and final) appeal. We conclude that despite the decision in Ford, it remains all but impossible for defense attorneys to prove that psychotic death row clients are incompetent for execution.     

The juvenile death penalty: A frustrated society's attempt for control

The United States is alone among western industrialized nations in allowing a provision for the juvenile death penalty. Specifically, 92% of the juveniles presently sentenced to death were convicted under a felony-murder doctrine which eliminates the state's burden of proving the mens rea requirement for murder. The high rate of felony-murder convictions of juveniles on death row is highly inconsistent with theories of punishment which have traditionally been used to support the death penalty.     

Christianity and Opposition to the Death Penalty: Late Modern Shifts

This article sketches the shifts in Christian thought and denominations on capital punishment from the early church to today in the United States, and then examines the ethical issues in the administration of capital punishment both before and since the Supreme Count stopped executions in 1972. The conclusion of the article is that overwhelming evidence of the injustice of death sentences could not sway popular support for capital punishment, but evidence that switching to life sentences could save states millions of dollars is swaying many pro‐death penalty voters and legislators.     

"i hope someone murders your mother!": an exploration of extreme support for the death penalty

Although general support for the death penalty is decreasing, a segment of the pro-death penalty population continues to support capital punishment with great vehemence. Extreme support for the death penalty is expressed through angry, confrontational, and sometimes threatening verbal attacks against condemned prisoners and opponents of capital punishment. Expressions of this support are especially strong around the time of highly publicized executions. This paper explores extreme support for capital punishment in the months before and after Tennessee's first execution in 40 years, using data gathered from newspaper reports, letters to the editor, interviews with death penalty opponents, and the authors' own experiences. Linking Bowers and Pierce's brutalization theory with community psychology theory, we explore ways in which highly publicized executions seem to unleash of hatred and violent intention among a number of death penalty supporters and how this behavior may illuminate research of increases in homicide after highly executions.     

Developmental differences in reactions to children labeled mentally retarded

In an attempt to examine age-related differences in response to the mental retardation label, 48 4th and 5th graders and 48 11th and 12th graders were told of a child of their own age and sex who was either labeled mentally retarded or unlabeled and who performed either competently or incompetently in giving a report. Incompetent target children were viewed more negatively than competent ones at both grade levels. The mental retardation label had less generalized impacts, leading girls but not boys (a) to cite lack of ability as the reason for a retarded child's failure, and (b) to hold low expectations that retarded targets would hold jobs, marry, or have children. A developmental shift in responses to the label was evident only on a trait perception measure; younger children stigmatized retarded targets, while older children granted special dispensation of a failing retarded child by viewing him or her more positively than a similarly incompetent but unlabeled child. Since only adolescent boys showed special dispensation, even though girls were more generally attentive to the label, both sex and age differences warrant further examination.     

Killing kids: The juvenile death penalty and community sentiment

In the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, “community sentiment” plays a central if not dispositive role in determining if a punishment is disproportionate. To gauge sentiment on the death penalty for juveniles, two experiments with death-qualified subjects were run, where age (a 15–25 age range) and case (heinousness) were varied in the first, and type of defendant (principal, accessory, or felony-murder accessory) and an extended age range (13–25) varied in the second. Significant age effects occur in both experiments, with approximately 75% and 65% refusing to give the death penalty for the youngest (13–15) and next youngest (16–18) groups, whereas 60% give the death penalty for the 25-year-old. In their reasons for their decisions, the killing kid was judged less blameworthy and death-worthy. Although politicians have called for “a man-sized punishment for a man-sized crime,” this community does not see that “man-sized” punishment fitting the kid.     

A National Survey of State Legislation defining mental retardation: implications for policy and practice after Atkins

In Atkins v. Virginia 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits executing offenders who are mentally retarded. Rather than adopting a uniform definition of mental retardation, the court charged each state with defining mental retardation in a manner that enforces the constitutional restriction. An unanswered question is how states define mental retardation after Atkins, which has implications for capital defendants and forensic evaluators who conduct capital mitigation evaluations. This project identified the statutory definitions of mental retardation in each state, and grouped the definitions based on consistency with accepted clinical criteria for mental retardation. Results show that definitions of mental retardation vary considerably by state. The large majority of states, both overall and specifically among death penalty states, use criteria for mental retardation that are not entirely consistent with accepted clinical standards. As such, it is not clear whether the majority of states are effectuating the intent of Atkins. The implications of these findings for both policy and practice are discussed.     

Father Knows Best: Parishes, Priests, and American Catholic Parishioners' Attitudes Toward Capital Punishment

Public opinion has important implications for capital punishment in the United States. Such opinion formation involves moral judgments irreducible to processing information on the administration of capital punishment or sentencing alternatives. Religious communities play a crucial role in resolving such moral dilemmas and giving meaning to available information. The Catholic Church strongly opposes capital punishment and strives to instruct lay Catholics on this issue. Accordingly, church attendance is associated with less support of the death penalty among Catholics but not among non-Catholics in the general population. Politically and socially conservative Catholic parishioners are more supportive of such punishment, while more religious parishioners report less such support. Parish priests significantly influence death penalty attitudes, in particular among more spiritual parishioners. Black Catholics are more supportive of the death penalty than their non-Catholic counterparts, in part because of a convergence in death penalty attitudes between blacks and whites in predominantly black parishes.     

Causal attributions of physical education majors and mentally retarded adults

This exploratory study examined the causal attributions and expectancies of 51 physical education majors and 25 mentally retarded adults. The majors completed a written questionnaire concerning their causal attributions and expectancies for motor performance of the adults. The adults responded through an interview procedure regarding causal attributions and expectancies for their own motor performance. Analysis did not support the hypothesis that people make stable attributions about the performance of mentally retarded populations and subsequently maintain low expectancies. Previous experiences of failure did not diminish the expectancies of the adults for their own future success.     

Enhancing the creative problem-solving skills of educable mentally retarded students

60 educable mentally retarded students from 3 schools in a large urban school system received 9 wk. of instruction from an adaptation of the Productive Thinking Program. Their performance on measures of creative thinking was compared with that of 60 students who received no additional instruction. The conclusions drawn were that (1) special attention to creative thinking training for educable mentally retarded students may be quite effective and results stable over time and (2) the measures of fluency, flexibility, and originality are the most useful in assessing creative thinking for this group.     

New directions in offender typology design,development, and implementation: Can we balance risk,treatment and control?

It should come as no surprise that there is no “one-stop shopping” offender typology available that can identify the risk level, targeted treatment protocols, and control levels of the offender groups examined in this special issue: murderers, sex offenders, batterers, violent prisoners, and violent mentally ill offenders. We are in desperate need of further research establishing the links between offender risk level, offender treatment needs, and offender control requirements for each of these offender groups. This article provides a “state of the art” discussion of the key issues that must be addressed by policymakers, practitioners, and ultimately, the public, vis-à-vis the design, development, and implementation of typologies for each of these targeted groups of offenders. This is followed by our assessment of the lessons learned from the great prison classification experiment. We conclude by providing an assessment of new directions in the development of typologies of offenders and the communities in which offenders reside, based on the simple notion that offender change–not offender control–needs to be the primary focus of the next generation of correctional classification systems.     

Competency to be executed: A therapeutic jurisprudence perspective

This Article analyzes the concept of competency to be executed. It examines the Supreme Court's 1986 decision in Ford v. Wainwright, discussing both its Eighth Amendment and procedural due process determinations. It then considers the standard that should be applied in determining competency in this context and the procedures that the states should utilize to insure a fair determination consistent with due process. The article then considers the perplexing problem of whether an incompetent death row prisoner may assert a constitutional or statutory right to refuse treatment designed to restore him to competency for execution, examining both the constitutional and therapeutic implications of involuntary treatment in this context.     

Comparison of selected gait parameters of trainable mentally retarded and nonretarded males

Although there were no significant differences in the single support phase of gait for 6 trainable mentally retarded boys (Mean age 9.6 yr.) and 6 nonretarded boys (Mean age 9.5 yr.), total gait time and time in double support were significantly different for the two groups, supporting previous research which showed gait was was deficient in trainable mentally retarded individuals.     

Socioscientific evidence and supreme court numerology: When justices attempt social science

In Stanford v. Kentucky, in which two juveniles sentenced to death raised an Eighth Amendment challenge, Justice Scalia's plurality opinion set the ground rules for deciding juvenile death penalty cases. He ruled ?socioscientific”? evidence and philosopher-king decisions out of bounds. Scalia argued that the Court must do its own social science analysis of the objective indicia to gauge whether community sentiment finds such a punishment cruel and unusual. In determining whether a ?national consensus”? exists, Justice Scalia transformed the empirical question into an impossible question, requiring that a categorical aversion must be shown. Petitioners lost, but so too did social science jurisprudence, as ?statistical magic”? and ?numerology”? reigned supreme.     

Protection of Children from Physical Maltreatment in Canada: An Evaluation of the Supreme Court's Definition of Reasonable Force

In 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada set out seven criteria to distinguish reasonable from abusive corrective force with children. We tested the validity of those criteria by mapping them onto a nationally representative data set of substantiated cases of physical abuse. The court's criteria defining reasonable force actually characterized the majority of cases of child physical maltreatment in Canada. These cases were more likely to be characterized by the use of spanking in the family than by each of the criteria set out by the Supreme Court. One in five cases was not characterized by any of the court's criteria, and virtually none were characterized by all of them. The findings provide stronger support for abolishing physical punishment than for legal attempts to narrow its definition.     

Social Dominance Orientation and the Ideological Legitimization of Social Policy1

Much of politics is involved with the distribution of resources and the regulation of intergroup relations. Social dominance theory posits that social ideologies provide social justification for policies that have unequal effects on different social groups. In the present studies, we examine the mediating role that ideologies have in transforming people's general orientation toward group inequality into policy support. Using data from 5 samples, we offer evidence that social dominance orientation orients people to support discriminatory ideologies, which in turn influence support for policies. Support for the theoretical model was shown in studies of both long-standing social policy attitudes, such as toward social welfare and military programs, and of unfolding political events, including Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court, the Persian Gulf War, and reinstitution of the death penalty in California.