Atkins v. Virginia

Common card · No. 328842

Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6–3 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments, but that states can define who has an intellectual disability. At the time Atkins was decided, 18 of the 38 death penalty states exempted mentally disabled offenders from the death penalty. Twelve years later in Hall v. Florida the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the discretion under which U.S. states can designate an individual convicted of murder as too intellectually incapacitated to be executed.

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