Contact Your State Senator and Urge Their Support of Senate Bill 628
Contact Your State Senator and Urge Their Support of Senate Bill 628
From the Arc of PA --Contact your State Senator - Support pre-trial/MR/death penalty ban bill
Support Pre-Trial Determination of Mental Retardation
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Implement U.S. Supreme Court Decision Properly in PA
The state senate is expected to consider SB628 during the next day or so. Please contact your state senator and urge their support.
Senator Mary Jo White's SB628 would implement in PA the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that bans capital punishment for people with mental retardation. The Arc of PA and 13 other disability organizations support SB628 because it adequately defines "mental retardation" and includes a provision to determine whether a defendant has mental retardation prior to the trial commencing. SB628 has passed both the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Appropriations Committee. The step is consideration by the full Senate.
Background: In 2002, the United States Supreme Court, in Atkins v. Virginia, found that the execution of persons with mental retardation violated the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The Court considered several issues, including whether a person with mental retardation is adversely affected by their areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses, whether such an individual acts with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct, and whether their impairments can jeopardize the eligibility and fairness of capital proceedings against defendants with mental retardation. The Court concluded the following: "such punishment is excessive and that the Constitution places a substantive restriction to the State's power to take the life of a mentally retarded offender."
The Supreme Court left if to the states to determine how to implement the ban. The Arc of Pennsylvania supports legislation in the PA General Assembly that will properly implement the Court's decision in Pennsylvania by 1) identifying defendants protected by Atkins through the application of an acceptable definition of mental retardation - one consistent with the definition published by the American Association for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (formerly AAMR), and 2) determining whether a defendant meets this definition before he or she is tried for the crime of which he or she is accused.
With respect to pretrial determination, defendants must have the option of a fair, pretrial judicial determination of mental retardation by a judge. Having what is essentially a clinical decision made after the trial by the same jury that had just handed down a guilty verdict -prejudiced by the evidence of the crime heard during the trial - makes it impossible for a defendant with mental retardation to have his or her condition established fairly. Moreover, capital cases are almost always longer, more labor intensive, and more expensive for the system than non-capital cases. It is simply wrong to put a presumed innocent defendant with mental retardation through a capital trial if the defendant is not eligible for capital punishment.