Most of the pris­on­ers on Oregon​’s death row suf­fer from sig­nif­i­cant men­tal impair­ments, accord­ing a study released on December 20, 2016 by the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard University. The Project’s analy­sis of case records, media reports, and opin­ions of Oregon legal experts found that two-thirds of the 35 peo­ple on the state’s death row ​“pos­sess signs of seri­ous men­tal ill­ness or intel­lec­tu­al impair­ment, endured dev­as­tat­ing­ly severe child­hood trau­ma, or were not old enough to legal­ly pur­chase alco­hol at the time the offense occurred.” The report argues that these char­ac­ter­is­tics make the pris­on­ers less cul­pa­ble than the aver­age offend­er. “[T]he U.S. Supreme Court has held that regard­less of the sever­i­ty of the crime, impo­si­tion of the death penal­ty upon a juve­nile or an intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled per­son, both class­es of indi­vid­u­als who suf­fer from impaired men­tal and emo­tion­al capac­i­ty rel­a­tive to typ­i­cal­ly devel­oped adults, would be so dis­pro­por­tion­ate as to vio­late his or her ​‘inher­ent dig­ni­ty as a human being,’ ” the report says, draw­ing par­al­lels between those class­es and the pris­on­ers includ­ed in the report. The study found that 9 of the 35 death row pris­on­ers (26%) ​“pre­sent­ed evi­dence of sig­nif­i­cant­ly impaired cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing as evi­denced by low IQ scores, frontal lobe dam­age, and fetal alco­hol syn­drome”; approx­i­mate­ly one in four exhib­it­ed symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness, or had a con­firmed men­tal health diag­no­sis; one-third suf­fered some form of severe child­hood or emo­tion­al trau­ma of the sort known to affect brain devel­op­ment; and six (17%) were under the age of 21 at the time of the offense. In one case, an Oregon death row pris­on­er was grant­ed a hear­ing to deter­mine whether he is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled after evi­dence showed he has a psy­chot­ic dis­or­der, par­tial fetal alco­hol syn­drome, vis­i­ble brain defects in his cor­pus cal­lo­sum, a low IQ, and deficits in adap­tive behav­ior that left him func­tion­ing at the lev­el of a sev­en-and-a-half-year old child. His co-defen­dant, a child­hood friend who admit­ted that he had exert­ed pres­sure on the first defen­dant to par­tic­i­pate in the crime, was giv­en a life sen­tence. The report con­cludes, ​“These find­ings raise a legit­i­mate ques­tion as to whether Oregon’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment scheme is capa­ble of lim­it­ing appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty to the most cul­pa­ble offend­ers.” Oregon cur­rent­ly has a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions, and has exe­cut­ed just two peo­ple in 40 years.

(C. Parks, ​“Most Oregon death row inmates suf­fer sig­nif­i­cant men­tal impair­ments, Harvard report finds,” The Oregonian, December 21, 2016; ​“NEW REPORT: OREGON’S DEATH PENALTY DISPROPORTIONATELY USED AGAINST PERSONS WITH SIGNIFICANT MENTAL IMPAIRMENTS,” Fair Punishment Project, December 20, 2016.) See Mental Illness and Intellectual Disability. Graphic by the Oregon Justice Resource Center (click here to enlarge)..

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