A New Jersey U.S. district court judge has barred federal prosecutors from seeking the death penalty against Farad Roland, finding that Roland is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for capital punishment. After an eighteen-day evidentiary hearing featuring sixteen witnesses, Judge Esther Salas ruled on December 18 that Roland—accused of five killings in connection with a drug-trafficking gang—had “abundantly satisfied his burden of proving his intellectual disability by a preponderance of the evidence.” In 2002 in Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court held that subjecting individuals with intellectual disability to the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments. Judge Salas’s ruling came almost exactly ten years after New Jersey abolished the death penalty, and ended efforts to obtain what would have been the first death sentence imposed in the state since abolition. The federal government may seek the death penalty in federal court under federal law, irrespective of whether the state in which the federal trial takes place itself authorizes capital punishment. The only other federal death-penalty case that has been tried in New Jersey ended with a life sentence in May 2007. Roland’s was the third federal capital case in the last year in which a defendant was spared the death penalty because of intellectual disability. In June 2017, federal prosecutors announced they would not appeal a New York federal district court’s determination that former death-row prisoner Ronell Wilson is intellectually disabled. Wilson had faced a capital resentencing hearing after his 2007 federal death sentence was overturned as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. In January 2017, President Barack Obama commuted the death sentence of Abelardo Arboleda Ortiz, in part because of evidence that Ortiz is intellectually disabled. Judge Salas found that Roland had satisfied all three prongs of the test to determine Intellectual Disability: “(1) intellectual-functioning deficits (indicated by an IQ score approximately two standard deviations below the mean—i.e., a score of roughly 70—adjusted for the standard error of measurement); (2) adaptive deficits (the inability to learn basic skills and adjust behavior to changing circumstances); and (3) the onset of these deficits while still a minor.” Accordingly, she concluded, “Roland is ineligible for the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment and the FDPA [Federal Death Penalty Act].” In comments to NJ Advance Media, Roland’s attorney, Richard Jasper, called Judge Salas’s decision “a thorough, detailed, thoughtful 135 page opinion that speaks for itself.”

(T. Moriarty, “Accused N.J. gang leader ineligible for the death penalty, judge rules,” NJ Advance Media, December 18, 2017.) Read the ruling in United States v. Farad Roland. See Federal Death Penalty and Intellectual Disability.

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