MENTAL HEALTH & INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY
The death penalty is routinely imposed on people experiencing profound mental illness. This is not a safeguard failure. It is a systemic choice.
There is no categorical ban on executing people with serious mental illness in the United States. Legal protections like competency evaluations and mitigation hearings routinely fail to prevent death sentences or executions. People living with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression, and other serious conditions are still sentenced to death, even when their illness shaped their behavior or impaired their ability to participate meaningfully in their defense.
The result is a system that punishes illness with execution. Jails and prisons exacerbate mental health conditions through isolation, violence, and neglect. Instead of treatment, people receive death sentences. This is not justice. It is abandonment.
Executing people with intellectual disability is unconstitutional. Yet in practice, it still happens.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court barred the execution of people with intellectual disability in 2002, some states continue to erect barriers that make protection nearly impossible. People with intellectual disabilities face an outsized risk of receiving death sentences due to restrictive legal standards and procedural hurdles that favor execution over mercy.
Before the constitutional ban, dozens of people with intellectual disability were executed. Since then, states have shifted tactics rather than ending the practice outright. The burden is placed on the person to prove disability under standards that ignore modern medical understanding and lived reality.
The Southern Center for Human Rights challenges death sentences imposed on people with serious mental illness and advocates for systems that respond with treatment rather than violence. A society committed to justice cannot execute people for being sick.
Resources / Toolkit
Our Death Penalty & Intellectual Disability Legal Advocacy Toolkit explains why Georgia is the only state that forces defendants to prove intellectual disability during a guilt trial and under the highest standard of proof and what we can do about it. Our toolkit breaks down the necessary procedural reforms (HB 123), provides key legal comparisons, and offers steps to advocate for change.
