MENTAL RETARDATION AND CRIME

The vast majority of people with mental retardation never break the law.
Nevertheless, mentally retarded people may be disproportionately represented in
America’s persons. Although people with mental retardation constitute
somewhere between 2.5 and 3 percent of U.S. population, experts estimate they
may constitute between 2 and 10 percent of the prison population. The
disproportionate number of persons with mental retardation in the incarcerated
population most likely reflects the fact that people with this impairment who
break the law are more likely to be caught, more likely to confess and be
convicted, and less likely to be paroled. It may also be that some of the people
with mental retardation who are serving the prison sentences are innocent, but
they confessed to crimes they did not commit because of their characteristic
suggestibility and desire to please authority figures. See Section IV below.

As with people of normal intelligence, many factors can prompt people with
mental retardation to commit crimes, including unique personal experiences,
poverty, environmental influences and individual characteristics. Attributes
common to mental retardation may, in particular cases, also contribute to criminal
behavior. The very vulnerabilities that cause problems for people with mental
retardation in the most routine daily interactions can, at times, lead to tragic
violence.

Many people with mental retardation are picked upon, victimized and humiliated
because of their disability. The desire for approval and acceptance and the need
for protection can lead a person with mental retardation to do whatever others tell
him. People with mental retardation can fall prey when people with greater
intelligence decide to take advantage of them, and they become the unwitting
tools of others. Many of the cases in which people with mental retardation have
committed murder involved other participants—who did not have mental
retardation—and/or occurred in the context of crimes, often robberies, that were
planned or instigated by other people. As one expert in mental retardation has
noted, “Most people with mental retardation don’t act alone. They are usually
dependent. They are never the ringleader or the leader of gang.”

“Joe, a mentally retarded man, admired tough-talking local drug dealers and
sought to befriend them. One day his drug dealer “friends” gave Joe a gun and
instructed him to go into a store and take money from the clerk. They told him,
however, “Don’t shoot the guy unless you have to. “Joe hid for while, and then
entered the store, but he forgot his instructions. “He panicked and couldn’t
remember the plan. He shot the guy and forgot to rob the store.”

Billy Dwayne White, a teenager with mental retardation, allied himself with older
men in the neighborhood, one of whom testified: “When Billy started hanging
around us he was real scared and timed. We told him that he would have to
change. We taught him how to steal. We would get him to do things that were
wrong by telling him that he was a coward if he didn’t and that he could only be
in our gang if he showed us that he had courage…we could persuade him to do
these things because he was easily misled.

People with mental retardation may also engage in criminal behavior because of
their characteristically poor impulse control, difficulty with long-term thinking,
and difficulty handling stressful and emotionally fraught situations. They may not
be able to predict the consequences of their acts or resist a strong emotional
response. The homicides committed by the people with mental retardation acting
alone are almost without exception unplanned, spur of the moment acts of
violence in the context of panic, fear, or anger, often committed when another
crime, such as a robbery, went wrong. For example, William Smith, I.Q. 65, tried
to take money from “old Dan,” a friendly elderly storekeeper he had known all his
life. When Dan resisted, smith panicked and lashed out, killing him.

Low intellectual skills and limited planning capacities mean that people who have
mental retardation are more likely than people of normal intelligence to get caught
if they commit crimes. As a result, they make goof “fall guys” for more
sophisticated criminals. A suspect with mental retardation is also less likely to
know how to avoid incriminating himself, hire a lawyer and negotiate a plea.