ABSTRACT
Mentally retarded individuals were subject to the death penalty in the United States until 2002, when the US Supreme Court decided Atkins v. Virginia, 536 US 304. By a six–three margin—six justices against state-sanctioned death of the mentally retarded and three justices for it—the Court imposed a moratorium on capital punishment of the mentally retarded, holding that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. The Court in Atkins, revisiting the issue thirteen years later, reversed course in its holding that executions were cruel and unusual punishment. The Court left it to the state courts and legislatures to determine what conditions must exist for a person to be declared mentally retarded. The majority in Atkins noted that in the years since Penry, eighteen state legislatures had passed laws limiting the death eligibility of certain defendants based on mental retardation alone.
