Disability Pride Month Series: Daryl Atkins, Death-Sentenced Prisoner Whose Case Resulted in New Legal Protections for People with Intellectual Disability

This July, in hon­or of Disability Pride Month, the Death Penalty Information Center is post­ing a week­ly fea­ture high­light­ing issues relat­ed to the death penal­ty and dis­abil­i­ty and pro­files of indi­vid­u­als who have played key roles in chang­ing the laws to pro­tect pris­on­ers with disabilities.

Daryl Atkins (pic­tured) became a piv­otal fig­ure in the American legal land­scape in 2002 due to his role as the named pris­on­er in a land­mark Supreme Court case con­cern­ing whether those who have intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty are con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly eli­gi­ble for the death penal­ty or if their exe­cu­tion would vio­late the pro­hi­bi­tion against ​“cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ments” in the Eighth Amendment.

Prosecutors alleged that on August 17, 1996, Daryl Atkins and William Jones abduct­ed a man named Eric Nesbitt at gun­point. They then robbed him and forced him to with­draw $200 dol­lars from an ATM — which was cap­tured on record­ed footage. Mr. Nesbitt was lat­er found dead, hav­ing been shot eight times. Mr. Atkins and Mr. Jones were charged with sev­er­al felonies, includ­ing cap­i­tal mur­der. Though both men admit­ted to their involve­ment in the rob­bery, each claimed the oth­er actu­al­ly shot the vic­tim. Crucially, in Virginia, only the per­son who pulled the trig­ger was eli­gi­ble for the death penal­ty. The pros­e­cu­tion per­suad­ed Mr. Jones to tes­ti­fy against Mr. Atkins in exchange for drop­ping death penal­ty charges against him and relied heav­i­ly on his tes­ti­mo­ny to secure a death sen­tence for Mr. Atkins.

At the sen­tenc­ing phase of the tri­al, a foren­sic psy­chol­o­gist tes­ti­fied that Mr. Atkins had ​“men­tal retar­da­tion” (now called intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty), high­light­ing a his­to­ry of fail­ure in school as well as his IQ of 59, which is in the low­est 1% of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion. Mr. Atkins was described by fam­i­ly, friends and for­mer teach­ers as some­one who strug­gled social­ly and was often the tar­get of jokes. Mr. Atkins’ father also tes­ti­fied that his son had rid­den a bicy­cle with train­ing wheels until he was 10 years old. Mr. Atkins’ for­mer high school foot­ball coach said that he noticed that Mr. Atkins could not dis­tin­guish between his left and right while play­ing foot­ball. His for­mer English teacher tes­ti­fied that as a stu­dent, Mr. Atkins strug­gled to under­stand the mate­r­i­al. Despite this evi­dence that Mr. Atkins was sig­nif­i­cant­ly impaired, he was sen­tenced to death. On appeal, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the sen­tence. 

In 2002, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Mr. Atkins’ appeal. Atkins v. Virginia brought nation­al atten­tion to the spe­cial vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of peo­ple with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty with­in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, and ulti­mate­ly led to the Supreme Court to cre­ate an impor­tant new legal prece­dent: the exe­cu­tion of peo­ple with this con­di­tion vio­lates the Eighth Amendment. Justice John Paul Stevens explained that the Court’s rul­ing, which over­turned the Court’s pre­vi­ous deci­sion made in the 1989 case of Penry v. Lynaugh, was moti­vat­ed by three key fac­tors: the trend of state leg­is­la­tures to exclude peo­ple from this group from death penal­ty eli­gi­bil­i­ty, the real­i­ty that peo­ple with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty are more like­ly to be coerced into false con­fes­sions, and the find­ing that peo­ple with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty are more like­ly to ​“act on impulse rather than pur­suant to a pre­med­i­tat­ed plan, and that in group set­tings they are fol­low­ers rather than lead­ers.” Thus, ​“their defi­cien­cies do not war­rant an exemp­tion from crim­i­nal sanc­tions, but they do dimin­ish their per­son­al cul­pa­bil­i­ty.” The Court estab­lished a two-prong stan­dard for state courts to use in deter­min­ing whether a defen­dant has an intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. The first prong, a sig­nif­i­cant impair­ment in intel­lec­tu­al func­tion­ing, requires that an indi­vid­ual have an IQ score approx­i­mate­ly two stan­dard devi­a­tions below the mean. This has his­tor­i­cal­ly meant that to have intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty under the first prong, the defen­dant must have an IQ of around 70 or below. The sec­ond prong is the assess­ment of poten­tial lim­i­ta­tions in adap­tive func­tion­ing – in oth­er words, how an indi­vid­ual can cope with the demands of every­day life. This sec­ond prong allows defen­dants to present evi­dence of long­stand­ing strug­gles with skills such as com­mu­ni­ca­tion, self-care, social­iz­ing, self-direc­tion, health and safe­ty, func­tion­al aca­d­e­mics, and work. Under the Court’s deci­sion in Atkins, these lim­i­ta­tions must be evi­dent in mul­ti­ple areas of func­tion­ing and man­i­fest before the age of 18 (some­times referred to as the third prong of the analy­sis). 

Despite the fact that his case estab­lished this prece­dent, the Supreme Court made no spe­cif­ic find­ing about Mr. Atkins’ men­tal capa­bil­i­ties and remand­ed his case to the tri­al court to deter­mine whether he had an intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. In August 2005, a jury in Yorktown, Virginia found that he did not, a deci­sion which allowed his death sen­tence to stand. But the Virginia Supreme Court unan­i­mous­ly over­turned this find­ing in 2006. Mr. Atkins’ death sen­tence was even­tu­al­ly com­mut­ed to life impris­on­ment in 2008 after a judge found pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct in his orig­i­nal 1998 tri­al. He remains in prison today. 

While the Atkins deci­sion pro­vides sig­nif­i­cant legal recog­ni­tion of both the reduced cul­pa­bil­i­ty of peo­ple with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty who com­mit crimes and the chal­lenges they face in the crim­i­nal legal sys­tem, the legal pro­ce­dures that deter­mine who is deserv­ing of legal pro­tec­tion often do not pro­tect many who need it the most. That’s because the Court said it would leave the pro­ce­dur­al deci­sions to state leg­is­la­tures. It would be anoth­er dozen years before the Court would agree to review a state’s com­pli­ance with the Atkins deci­sion, find­ing Florida’s pro­ce­dures inad­e­quate (Hall v. Florida) and lat­er, those of Texas (Moore v. Texas). 

The deter­mi­na­tion of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty depends on state law and the defense team’s abil­i­ty to engage in a rig­or­ous inves­ti­ga­tion of their client’s life, includ­ing exten­sive inter­view­ing, psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tions, and thor­ough reviews of edu­ca­tion­al and med­ical records. This process inher­ent­ly favors defen­dants with access to qual­i­ty coun­sel and ade­quate resources. In states like Georgia, state law requires that defen­dants prove their dis­abil­i­ty ​“beyond a rea­son­able doubt,” the high­est legal stan­dard in the coun­try, and one which pre­vents many impaired indi­vid­u­als from ben­e­fit­ting from the pro­tec­tions Atkins promised. Thus, while Atkins v. Virginia set a cru­cial legal prece­dent, there is still much work to be done to pro­tect vul­ner­a­ble indi­vid­u­als with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty in our crim­i­nal justice system.