Although the U.S. Supreme Court has deter­mined that the intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abiled (men­tal­ly retard­ed) are barred from the death penal­ty, the deci­sion of whether a defen­dant meets this dis­abil­i­ty stan­dard is not made by men­tal health experts but by jurors and judges. A recent study pub­lished in Law & Psychology Review found that jurors expect a much low­er lev­el of intel­lec­tu­al func­tion­ing than men­tal health experts to arrive at a find­ing of dis­abil­i­ty. Moreover, jurors are per­suad­ed away from a dis­abil­i­ty find­ing by state­ments that the defen­dant knew his actions were wrong – even though such knowl­edge should not dis­qual­i­fy some­one from being intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled. The study con­clud­ed that ​“jury pool mem­bers were less like­ly than expe­ri­enced men­tal health work­ers to see severe impair­ments in func­tion­ing as evi­dence” of an intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. The impli­ca­tion of these find­ings is that fact find­ers are like­ly to fail to iden­ti­fy defen­dants with more mod­er­ate intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties, even when impair­ments clear­ly meet diag­nos­tic cri­te­ria used by men­tal heath pro­fes­sion­als. Read full study.

(M. Boccaccini, et al., ​“Jury Pool Members’ Beliefs About the Relation Between Potential Impairments in Functioning and Mental Retardation,” 34 Law and Psychology Review 1, 21 (2010)). See Studies on the death penal­ty and Intellectual Disability.

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