Florida’s Unconstitutional Death Penalty

Florida Death Chamber

As the death penalty becomes rarer and more concentrated in a few parts of the country, the states that continue to employ it are resorting to more desperate schemes to kill people.

In January, for the third time in as many months, Missouri executed an inmate whose appeals were still pending. (A federal appellate judge wrote that he was “alarmed” by the state’s conduct.) Meanwhile, several states are refusing to disclose where they are buying the execution drugs they use, which come from unregulated compounding pharmacies.

And while the Supreme Court categorically banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities as unconstitutional in 2002, some states continue to defy that principle by interpreting the court’s words as narrowly as possible. In that case, Atkins v. Virginia, the court said reduced mental capacity made a defendant less culpable, but left it to states to enforce the ruling.

On Monday, the court heard oral arguments in a case challenging Florida’s attempt to get around the 2002 decision by requiring intellectual disability to be proved by an I.Q. score of 70 or less, even though the test includes a margin of error of five points.

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Source: The New York Times, Editorial Board, March 3, 2014