—In other words, Apos, they should not have been convicted - and therefore should not be in prison at all.—
I’m not sure what you mean. Who? Most people agree that even severely retarded people CAN tell right from wrong. Telling right from wrong is not the distinction that this case draws. Rather, it rules that there is enough of a national consensus now that holds that killing people who are the mental age of pre-teens at best, is wrong.
Personally, I’m not sure I see the rationale behind killing anyone when there is no immediate overidding pressure (self-defense) or are alternative options. But that presumes something that is simply not true: that the law must make sense. There is no such principle. On the law, I’m not sure this case was decided correctly. Or course, Scalia is one to talk about not making up the law to fit his opinions.
Not true. There are three possible justifications for punishment of criminals: deterrence, retribution, and incapacitation. Life in prison incapacitates the criminal as effectively as the death penalty. The Supreme Court explains why deterrence and retribution cannot be applied to retarded people (pp. 14-15).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but death incapacitates rather more permanently. I don’t think those of us who favor the death penalty over lifetime incarceration are moral degenerates (not thaqt you said we were, but the arguments tend to lead in that direction). We just realize that a person who is too dangerous to walk among us should be prevented from doing so permanently, and warehousing such people is more cruel ultimately than ending them. Or do you imagine that you could be happy, or even content, deprived of any greater volition than which prison jumpsuit to wear? Personally, I’d rather be dead than locked up for life.
All that said, the OP was addressing “the flip side,” or, as I understand it, the possible unintended consequences of this decision. Gainsayers notwithstanding, it seems obvious to me that more and more people will escape the responsibility for their actions as they go for the “stupidity defence.” It’s bad enough that “insanity” is a legal defense. Maybe I’m just simple minded (I’ll save you the trouble of saying so), but I think the simplest answer, at least in this case, is best. Do the crime: pay for it.
If the “test” that is given for intelligence were proven and definitive, there might be some justification for applying it in criminal cases. But there is debate even as to what intelligence is, to say nothing of the ongoing debate among psychologists as to how to measure it. The Supremes might just as well have said, “we don’t know how to define retardation either, but we know it when we see it.” That kind of argument historically has been controversial, as I’m sure you are aware.
At any rate, at least for now, the Court has spoken, and we are stuck with their somewhat retarded (IMHO) decision.
Well, so what if it does? The rights of children to engage in certain activities is restricted because of their immature judgement. The mentally retarted can be in the same state as children so maybe the same rules should apply.
This echos Mr. Justice Scalia’s dissent. However, Scalia and apparently Caveman have no qualms about applying the standards of US residents of over 200 years ago who are probably more “foreign” to us now than are contemporary Europeans. After all at that time bear-baiting and dog fighting were popular and, as far as I know, perfectly legal sports, at least on the frontier. Slavery was in vogue and numerous of our leading citizens and best thinkers, i.e. Jefferson, Washington, Madison, et. al., owned some.
In addition, advocating this point of view undercuts our international effort to improve the way in which foreign governments treat their citizens. For example, “The United States can mind its own business when it comes to how we treat our women here in Saudi Arabia.”
I think this is an invalid “scare headline” type of objection. The Court’s opinion left it up to the states to determine the grounds for this type of defense against imposition of the death penalty. However, there was this guideline in the decision for the states to heed. “As discussed above, clinical definitions of mental retardation require not only subaverage intellectual functioning, but also significant limitations in adaptive skills such as communication, self-care, and self-direction that became manifest before age 18.”
So it seems to me that the majority is saying quite clearly that there must be an established prior history and evidence of mental retardation in order for this ruling to apply.
Let’s think about this for a moment. It would seem that we are granting the retarded special privileges. Why? It would seem that killing an intelligent person would be crueler than killing a retarded person because the intelligent one would understand what was happening, while the retarded one might have some difficulty understanding the situation. The decision doesn’t make any sense when one considers the fact that retarded people can be convicted. Why should only death be considered “cruel and unusual?” Oh, and if anyone would suggest that retarded people can not understand right and wrong, I have a few things to say. One, this is not always the case. Two, if it were the case, such people would probably be nothing more than animals with human bodies and thus beyond the realms of human ethics. They would then enter the realm of “animal ethics” or the way that humans can treat animals, so killing them would be perfectly acceptable, it’s okay for cows, right?
I’d suggest the OP is a tad misleading. It’s not entirely accurate to say it’s about “retarded” people, nor as subsequent posters have assumed, about IQ levels. Rather it’s about mental competency, which is a more complicated concept than “Is he a 70 or a 71”
“The central issue is not retardation but competence. I would not be surprised to learn that low-IQ defendants make up a disproportionate share of those found to be incompetent to stand trial any more than I would be surprised to learn that high-IQ defendants make up a disproportionate share of those found to be competent. But the key question is not to measure their IQ or to allow experts to decide whether they are retarded; it is, instead, to decide if they are competent to stand trial. No one who is incompetent should stand trial or be executed as a result of a conviction.”