The Atkins v. Virginia decision made executing people with intellectual disabilities unconstitutional, reversing a legal position that had left Horace Dunkins and others exposed to execution. In Bryan Stevenson’s account, the change came thirteen years after the Court had upheld the practice—and too late for Dunkins, whose botched execution had already taken place.

Background and Timing

Only a few months before Dunkins’s scheduled execution, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Dunkins had intellectual disabilities; the trial judge had reached that finding from his school records and earlier testing. With his execution approaching, his family called repeatedly to ask what could be done, but few options remained.

The Ruling

Thirteen years later, the Supreme Court of the United States recognized that executing people with intellectual disabilities constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and prohibited the practice as unconstitutional. The decision overturned the rule that had governed when Dunkins faced execution. The account identifies the constitutional change and its practical consequence, without describing the Court’s reasoning in greater detail.

Consequences and Significance

For Dunkins, the ruling arrived too late. Officials had already electrocuted him in a botched procedure: the electric chair initially delivered only a partial charge, and after several agonizing minutes officials stopped it, waited, corrected the electrode connections, and executed him again. The later constitutional prohibition marks a sharp contrast between a recognized limit on state punishment and a protection that did not exist in time to save him. The case thus appears in the narrative not as an abstract legal development alone, but as a change measured against the fate of a disabled man whose execution the earlier rule had permitted.