is competent must be reversed for lack of any evidentiary support”. The ruling did not address whether the state 
constitution forbids the execution of someone forcibly drugged or whether the defendant, in this case, is too ill to 
be executed at all. Another mentally ill individual, John Ferguson, was executed in August 2013 in Florida through 
four mental health organizations maintained that he had suffered from mental illness for at least 40 years. Similarly, 
Marshall Gore, another Florida inmate with mental illness, was executed in October 2013. 
Link to mental illness and the death penalty 
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/mental-illness-and-death-penalty 
A different but related issue is the constitutionality of executing mentally retarded individuals who have 
committed capital offenses. In 1989,  the Court held that executions of mentally retarded prisoners do not 
necessarily violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause if juries are allowed to consider evidence of mental 
retardation as a mitigating factor in the sentencing phase of a capital trial. Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302 (1989). 
Later, in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), the Court reconsidered, holding that there was a sufficient national 
consensus for the Court to prohibit the execution of mentally retarded persons via the Eighth Amendment. Justice 
Stevens concluded, 
“[M]entally retarded person who meets the law’s requirement for criminal responsibility should be tried and 
punished when they commit crimes. Because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of 
their impulses, however, they do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult 
criminal conduct” 
2. 
On February 27th, 2019  the Court affirmed that the states may not execute a death row inmate who was unable 
to understand his punishments due to dementia.  In Madison v. Alabama, ___ U.S. ___ (2019), the 70-year-old 
defendant had spent 33 years in solitary confinement after having been sentenced to death for killing a police officer 
in 1985.  Madison had suffered a series of strokes causing severe cognitive impairment due to vascular dementia and 
the inability to remember his crime.  Justice Kagan’s majority opinion held that an inmate’s failure to remember 
his crime does not by itself render him immune from execution, but “such memory loss still may factor into the 
‘rational understanding’ analysis that Panetti demands.” If memory loss “combines and interacts with other mental 
shortfalls to deprive a person of the capacity to comprehend” his death sentence, “then the Panetti  standard will be 
satisfied.” ____ U.S. ____, at ____ (2019) 
According to the Court, it doesn’t matter if these “mental shortfalls” stem from delusions, dementia, or some other 
disorder. Courts must “look beyond any given diagnosis to a downstream consequence”—whether a disorder can 
“so impair the prisoner’s concept of reality” that he cannot “come to grips with” the meaning of his punishment.” 
Juvenile Offenders and the Death Penalty 
Historically, juveniles were treated no differently than adults in the criminal justice system, and thus, 
there is a long history of executing juveniles convicted of capital crimes. In the late 1980s, the Court 
2. Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002). 
ALISON S. BURKE, DAVID CARTER, BRIAN FEDOREK, TIFFANY MOREY, LORE RUTZ-BURRI, AND SHANELL
SANCHEZ
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