Intellectual disability

Intellectual disability appears in the book not as an abstract diagnosis but as a condition with immediate consequences in court: it can be documented and still fail to prevent a death sentence, or deepen a person’s vulnerability to coercion and inadequate representation. The cases of Horace Dunkins and Victoria Banks expose those failures directly. Joe Sullivan’s history offers a related account of how serious cognitive and developmental limitations could be obscured by punitive judgments, though the book does not specifically identify his disabilities as intellectual disability.

Recognition Without Protection

The trial judge in Horace Dunkins’s case found that he had intellectual disabilities, relying on his school records and earlier testing. That finding did not stop the State of Alabama from setting an execution date. Just months before the scheduled execution, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the practice of executing people with intellectual disabilities. Thirteen years later, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Court ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and banned the practice. For Dunkins, the change came too late.

The interval between the two rulings is central to the book’s account: the evidence of disability was present in Dunkins’s case, but recognition offered no protection under the law then in force. His family called repeatedly in the final days, trying to learn what could still be done. When stopping the execution proved impossible, they focused on preventing an autopsy, which they opposed for religious reasons. Their concern for his body after death was overridden as completely as their effort to save his life.

Horace Dunkins’s Execution and Its Aftermath

Dunkins’s execution was botched. Correctional officials had connected the electric chair’s electrodes incorrectly, delivering only a partial charge. After several agonizing minutes, they switched the chair off; Dunkins was unconscious but still breathing. Officials waited several more minutes, then realized the electrodes were improperly connected. They altered the connections and electrocuted him a second time.

The State performed an autopsy despite the family’s repeated requests that it not do so. Dunkins’s father then contacted Bryan Stevenson, saying the State had taken his son’s life without a fair trial and had also interfered with his body and soul. The Equal Justice Initiative assisted a volunteer lawyer in filing a civil suit. Depositions were taken, but the suit produced no relief and did not slow the State’s subsequent executions. The episode joins the legal failure to recognize disability as a limit on punishment with a separate disregard for the family’s wishes after death.

Disability, Poverty, and a False Accusation

Victoria Banks’s case shows another way disability could leave someone exposed to the criminal process. Banks was an intellectually disabled Black woman in Choctaw County, Alabama. Police accused her of killing a newborn despite having no credible basis to believe she had ever been pregnant. The accusation began after she reportedly told a deputy sheriff she was pregnant to avoid jail time in an unrelated matter; months later, when she had no child, law enforcement treated that earlier claim as evidence of a killing.

Without adequate legal assistance, Banks was coerced into pleading guilty alongside her sister, Diane Tucker, to killing an infant who had never existed. Facing capital-murder charges and the possibility of a death sentence, Banks accepted a twenty-year prison term. Officials refused to investigate her claim of innocence before sending her to prison. Her release came only after the defense established that she had undergone a tubal ligation five years before her arrest, making it biologically impossible for her to have conceived or given birth. The case demonstrates how disability, race, and inadequate representation could compound one another: the accusation proceeded without a credible account of a pregnancy, while the decisive medical fact emerged only through later investigation.

Related Vulnerability in Joe Sullivan’s Case

The book does not label Joe Sullivan intellectually disabled, but it records mental disabilities and limitations that shaped his treatment. At the time of his 1989 arrest, he was thirteen and read at a first-grade level. His father had repeatedly abused him, he had suffered severe neglect, and his family life had been described by state officials as abusive and chaotic. Between ages ten and thirteen, he had no stable home and moved through at least ten addresses. His encounters with police largely involved nonviolent or misdemeanor-level conduct.

A juvenile probation officer described Sullivan as immature, easily influenced, and more follower than leader, while also seeing potential for him to become a positive and productive person. The sentencing judge interpreted the same history differently, characterizing the juvenile system as incapable of helping him and claiming he had been offered repeated chances to change. The book stresses that he had not in fact received a second, much less a third, chance to put his life right. After a one-day trial, a six-person jury convicted him; his appointed lawyer had filed no written pleadings and said little at sentencing. Sullivan was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. His case is not presented as a specific finding of intellectual disability, but it extends the book’s account of how cognitive limitations, childhood trauma, and inadequate defense can be recast as evidence of incorrigibility.