Competence, Culpability, and Punishment: Implications of Atkins for Executing and Sentencing Adolescents

The Supreme Court has explored the issues of culpability, proportionality, and deserved punishment most fully in the context of capital punishment. In death penalty decisions addressing developmental impairments and culpability, the Court has considered the cases of defendants with mental retardation and older adolescents, and has created an anomalous inconsistency by reaching opposite conclusions about the deserved punishment for each group of defendants. Recently, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Court relied on both empirical and normative justifications to categorically prohibit states from executing defendants with mental retardation. Atkins reasoned that mentally retarded offenders lacked the reasoning, judgment, and impulse control necessary to equate their culpability with that of other death-eligible criminal defendants. This Article contends that the same psychological and developmental * Centennial Professor of Law, University of Minnesota, B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1966; J.D., University of Minnesota Law School, 1969; Ph.D. (Sociology), Harvard University, 1973. 1 would like to thank Steven Drizin, Richard Frase, Wayne Logan, Monte Norgaard, and Victor Streib for critical and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. The questions and comments of faculty and student participants at the University of Houston Law School Symposium, January, 2004, helped to sharpen the analysis. I received outstanding research assistance from Brittany Stephens, Class of 2005.