UC Irvine

The Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) that intellectually disabled defendants cannot be sentenced to death. However, little is known about how intellectual disability judgments are made by jurors in capital cases. Our experiment addresses this gap by examining the impact of both clinical expert opinions and crime information on jurors’ disability judgments and death sentencing behavior. In a study of 286 venire jurors, we found that expert opinions significantly influenced juror disability decisions and death sentencing – with juror judgments tending to align with expert opinions – and exposure to crime details made jurors significantly more likely to sentence the defendant to death. Our results suggest that to protect the rights of disabled defendants, it may be necessary for courts to have a separate hearing on the issue of intellectual disability specifically – without crime details – to ensure jurors are not unduly influenced.