Abstract
This study examined the cases of women on death in which evidence of the defendant’s intellectual disability or mental illness was presented at trial. Of the total population of 52 women on death row at the beginning of 2020 and seven recently-executed women, over 50% qualified for the study. According to expert testimony, most of the women in the sample had a below-average IQ score and/or a neurological deficit, and all but three suffered from a serious mental illness. Almost all had abusive and dysfunctional backgrounds. Recent Supreme Court rulings have banned the execution of defendants with intellectual disability and opened the door to a consideration of execution exemption for defendants with severe mental illness or brain abnormalities. However, considerable judicial equivocation over the meaning and measurement of mental impairments remains. Even as a mitigating factor, the mental health problems of the defendants in this study were given little weight.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
