The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday upheld the state's strict threshold for death-penalty defendants to clear in order to prove they are mentally disabled -- and thus not eligible for capital punishment.
By a 6-1 vote, the court allowed Georgia to remain the only state in the country that requires capital defendants to prove they are mentally disabled beyond a reasonable doubt, the most stringent burden of proof in the justice system. The justice who dissented called the ruling "a senseless assault against morality" because it increases the chance that such inmates will be sentenced to death.
The court ruled against a challenge raised by Alphonso Stripling, who shot and killed two co-workers at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Douglasville in 1988. Stripling has already been convicted of the killings, but now faces a sentencing trial.
The ruling, written by Justice Harold Melton, noted the state Supreme Court had already upheld the strict burden of proof for "mental retardation" claims and stands by that 2003 decision.
In 1988, Georgia became the first state in the country to ban the execution of the mentally disabled. In doing so, the Legislature chose the heightened legal threshold.
In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court declared it was unconstitutional to execute mentally disabled individuals because they do not act with the same level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct.
In that decision, the U.S. Supreme Court made no negative comments about Georgia's heightened burden of proof, Melton wrote. For that reason, he said, it seems "entirely illogical" that the threshold violates the Eighth Amendment's ban against cruel and unusual punishment.
Justice Robert Benham strongly disagreed. He noted 22 other states have adopted the least difficult legal threshold: the preponderance of the evidence -- or more likely than not -- standard.
The beyond a reasonable doubt threshold, he said, "is essentially an insurmountable hurdle for defendants." By having it, Georgia will allow the execution of defendants who are in all probability mentally disabled or even almost certainly mentally disabled, he said.
“Are we so focused on maximizing the absolute penalty of death that we would risk wrongfully executing someone with a clinically identified mental disability?" he wrote. "To do so is an impermissible violation of our Constitution and a senseless assault against morality and human decency."
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