Statement of Larry Frankel, Legislative Director, in response to the December 27, 2005, PA Supreme Court Decision:
Philadelphia(PA): The American Civil Liberties Union once again urges the Pennsylvania General Assembly to pass balanced and fair legislation that would prohibit the execution of individuals with mental retardation. We agree with the suggestion of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court contained in its opinion of December 27, 2005, in the case of Commonwealth v. Joey Miller. The Court called on the legislature to finally enact legislation to implement the 2002 United States Supreme Court’s Atkins decision that declared that it is unconstitutional to execute individuals with mental retardation.
Three and one-half years ago the ACLU testified at a public hearing conducted by the Pennsylvania Senate Judiciary Committee. This was even before Atkins had been decided. At that time we called on the legislature to pass legislation prohibiting the execution of persons with mental retardation.
Since the Atkins decision we have regularly called on the legislature to pass a bill that both defines who is a person with mental retardation and provides a person with mental retardation a reasonable opportunity to have a court determine, pre-trial, that he is ineligible for the death penalty.
The ACLU believes that we must provide a fair procedure for defendants with mental retardation because such people lack the level of maturity and culpability to ever make death an appropriate punishment. We think the legislature and the courts should take special care in preventing the wrongful execution of a person with mental retardation.
Studies have shown that when an individual with mental retardation waives his or her Fifth Amendment rights and confesses to a crime, that waiver is almost certainly not ‘knowing and intelligent,’ as the Supreme Court’s decisions have long required.
Furthermore, when taken into police custody and interrogated, individuals with mental retardation are more likely than people with average IQs to confess and many times more likely to confess to crimes they did not commit.
We know this happens -- we remember Earl Washington, Jr., a man with mental retardation who falsely confessed. Washington spent more that 18 years in prison, 9 of those on death row, before he was granted a pardon and released after being exonerated by DNA testing.
For over three years, the ACLU of Pennsylvania has been working with numerous advocates for people with mental retardation and civic and religious organizations concerned about the fair application of the death penalty in an effort to have legislation passed that makes it clear that Pennsylvania prohibits the execution of persons with mental retardation and establishes a procedure that safely guards against the possibility of a mistaken execution of a person with mental retardation.
Today we reaffirm our support for legislation that complies with the spirit and letter of the United States Supreme Court decision of 2002 and provides real protections against mistaken executions.
|
