Advocacy and Litigation in Professional Practice

Abstract

On June 20, 2002, the Supreme Court of the United States overruled years of settled legal precedent when it declared that the execution of individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) violated the United States Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment (Atkins v. Virginia, 2002). This decision is the most recent in a line of cases that have been decided over the past 20 years that have changed the legal framework within which professionals who work with individuals with ID must function. As has been the case with most of these legal landmarks, Atkins represented the culmination of decades of legal and legislative advocacy on behalf of criminal defendants with ID seeking to bar the imposition of the death penalty in such cases. It had been a long and rocky road in reaching this watershed legal event. Indeed, only 13 years earlier the Supreme Court had ruled that the Eighth Amendment did not bar the execution of criminal defendants with ID (Penry v. Lynaugh, 1989). What had changed in those intervening years?