ABSTRACT
The Southern Internship Programme was founded in 2001 to respond to the crisis in capital representation in the South. During four of the summers, students from Berkeley Law were included in the programme. In preparation for the internship, during the spring semester preceding the internship, students attend four training sessions covering death penalty law and practice, with particular emphasis on conditions in the South. The work of the interns and the range of their experiences vary according to the needs of the offices and the procedural posture of the cases when the interns arrive. In Texas, the Court of Criminal Appeals ordered that any death row inmate claiming mental retardation had one year from the date of the Atkins v. Virginia decision to petition for relief. The Texas Defender Service (TDS) immediately began an attempt to determine who on Texas's large death row might be mentally retarded and to investigate all possible claims.
