Deference to the Majority: Why Isn't the Supreme Court Applying the Reasoning of Atkins v. Virginia to Juveniles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On June 20, 2002, the Supreme Court decided Atkins v. Virginia, 1 holding that the execution of mentally retarded criminals is "cruel and unusual punishment" and therefore directly violates the Eighth Amendment.This decision overruled the Court's 1989 ruling in Penry v. Lynaugh, 3 which allowed the execution of mentally retarded criminals. 4 On the same day that the Court decided Penry, it ruled on another death penalty case-Stanford v. Kentucky. 5 The Stanford ruling upheld the death penalty as used against a different class of criminals-juvenile offenders between the ages of sixteen and seventeen. 6he Atkins majority indicated that its decision had no bearing on the Stanford decision. 7Yet two months later, three members of the Atkins majority stated otherwise.In their dissent urging a stay of the execution of Toronto Patterson, who was arrested for murdering three people when he was seventeen years-old, Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer, argued that it was time to reconsider juvenile executions in light of the Atkins ruling. 8
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".