Georgia Death Penalty Law in Question Over Language Mistake - Crime Report

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide whether to hear a case challenging a Georgia law requiring capital defendants seeking to be spared execution to prove they are intellectually disabled beyond a reasonable doubt, a standard that the law’s initial drafters say was written in error, reports the New York Times. Jack Martin, one of the provision’s drafters, claims that he and his co-author had not meant to impose a reasonable doubt standard, but they put a key clause in the wrong place.

The case concerns Rodney Young, who was convicted in 2012 of killing the son of his estranged girlfriend and classified as intellectually disabled by his New Jersey school system. A jury decided that Young had failed to prove he was intellectually disabled beyond a reasonable doubt and sentenced him to death, thus largely letting states decide who qualified as intellectually disabled before being struck down by two proceeding decisions in 2014 and 2017. Today, almost every other state besides Georgia requires defendants to prove they are intellectually disabled by showing it to be more likely than not, placing an extraordinary burden on capital defendants seeking to be spared and contradicting a 2002 Supreme Court decision, Atkins v. Virginia, ruling that the Eighth Amendment forbids putting intellectually disabled people to death. Dissenting from the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision upholding the state law, Justice Charles J. Bethel said simple logic demonstrated that the law created, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, “an unacceptable risk” that some intellectually disabled people would be executed.

source: https://thecrimereport.org/2022/01/04/georgia-death-penalty-law-in-question-over-language-mistake/

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