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1 1 (May 1, 2026)

handle is hein.crs/goveuih0001 and id is 1 raw text is: The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause's Ban on Executing the Intellectually Disabled May 1, 2026 In 2002, the Supreme Court in Atkins v. Virginia ruled that the imposition of capital punishment on the intellectually disabled constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment, leaving to the states the responsibility to determine who qualifies as intellectually disabled. (The Eighth Amendment binds both the federal as well as state and local governments by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment.) In and after Atkins, the Court has provided some guideposts to the states in performing this constitutional inquiry. The Court has not, however, resolved whether and how states may consider a defendant's scores from multiple Intellectual Quotient (IQ) tests. This term, in Hamm v. Smith, the Court may resolve the open question. This Sidebar discusses the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on the Eighth Amendment and the imposition of capital punishment on the intellectually disabled. It sketches the Supreme Court's specific decisions applying the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause to the subject of executing the intellectually disabled. Against this backdrop, this Sidebar provides an overview of the Hamm case that remains pending before the Supreme Court. Finally, this Sidebar closes with considerations for Congress. The Categorical Ban on Imposing Capital Punishment on Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities Atkins v. Virginia In 2002, the Supreme Court determined in Atkins v. Virginia that subjecting prisoners with intellectual disabilities to capital punishment had become truly unusual, and that it was fair to say that a national consensus had developed against this policy. To wit, in 1989, only two states that otherwise permitted capital punishment and the federal government prohibited the execution of persons with intellectual disabilities. By contrast, in 2002, the Court observed, an additional sixteen states that otherwise allowed capital punishment had prohibited execution of persons with intellectual disabilities, and no states had reinstated the power. What mattered, the Court clarified, was not so much the number of states that had changed course, but instead the consistency of the direction of change. Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB11426 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress