Relying on Hall, Coonce argued that the rigid age cutoff of 18 should also be unconstitutional. Florida, striking down Florida’s rigid IQ cutoff of 70 for determining intellectual disability.
In 2014, while Coonce’s penalty-phase trial was underway, the Court decided Hall v. His lawyers nevertheless sought a hearing on his eligibility for the death penalty, arguing that intellectual disability is a developmental disorder that is diagnosed whenever its impairments manifest during “the developmental period,” which historically has been considered age 22. When Coonce was tried, however, the diagnostic criteria for intellectual disability used by the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disability (AAIDD) required that the disorder manifest before age 18. Coonce’s prosecutors and defense lawyers agree that he became intellectually disabled at age 20 after sustaining a traumatic brain injury that caused bleeding around his brain and put him in a brief coma. Virginia that using the death penalty against individuals with intellectual disability constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. “This Court,” she wrote, “has an obligation to protect our Constitution’s mandates.” Noting the parties’ agreement that Coonce is ineligible for the death penalty under current diagnostic standards for determining intellectual disability, she said its failure to vacate Coonce’s death sentence “falls short of fulfilling that obligation today.”Ĭoonce’s claim that he is ineligible for the death penalty arises out of the Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. “To my knowledge, the Court has never before denied a in a capital case where both parties have requested it,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “let alone where a new development has cast the decision below into such doubt.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor (pictured), joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, dissented. Department of Justice (DOJ) and defense lawyers, the Court on Novemdenied a petition by federal death-row prisoner Wesley Coonce to vacate his death sentence and return his case to a Missouri federal court to evaluate his intellectual disability claim using current diagnostic criteria for the disorder. Supreme Court has declined to review the case of a death-row prisoner whom prosecutors and defense lawyers agree is not eligible for the death penalty as a result of recent revisions of the definition of intellectual disability by the medical community. In a ruling that provoked a sharp dissent from the Court’s liberal minority, the U.S.
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