Mental retardation and the death penalty: a guide to State Legislative issues.

Causes of Judicial and Legal Criminal Policy Disagreement in Drug-Related Offenses from the Legal-Ethical Approach

Background: The legislative review of the criminal record on the crime of repetition and the severity of the punishment for repeated offenders indicates that the legislator firstly used various laws to include repetition of crime, and in some cases such as drug offenses and for criminal reasons. It has taken into account a certain degree of exacerbation that is markedly different from what is s...

Notes and Comment following in the Footsteps of Ford: Mental Retardation and Capital Punishment Post-atkins

not categorically prohibited by the Eighth Amendment). 2. See Lyn Entzeroth, Putting the Mentally Retarded Criminal Defendant to Death: Charting the Development of a National Consensus to Exempt the Mentally Retarded from the Death Penalty, 52 ALA. L. REV. 911 (2001); EMILY FABRYCK REED, THE PENRY PENALTY: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AND OFFENDERS WITH MENTAL RETARDATION 14 (1993). 3. Atkins v. Virginia...

Mental Retardation and the Death Penalty: The Need for an International Standard Defining Mental Retardation

Some contrarian concerns about law, psychology, and public policy.

I discuss six issues that may cut against the majoritarian grain. They are: (1) The U.S. Supreme Court's view of children; (2) the American Psychological Association's view of people with mental retardation; (3) the dilution of autonomy in favor of beneficence; (4) Tarasoff's undermining of fidelity to therapy clients; (5) the misuse of the PCL-R in death penalty litigation; and (6) the crimina...

Of Atkins and men: deviations from clinical definitions of mental retardation in death penalty cases.

Under Atkins v. Virginia, the Eighth Amendment exempts from execution individuals who meet the clinical definitions of mental retardation set forth by the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and the American Psychiatric Association. Both define mental retardation as significantly subaverage intellectual functioning accompanied by significant limitations in adapti...