Last Friday, the Virgina Senate passed a law which would prohibit executions for individuals with IQs below 70 and those with “significant limitations in adaptive functioning.” The issue of the mentally retarded has always been a contentious side debate of the capital punishment epic, but in reality what it presents is more of a dangerous straw-man tactic by opponents of the death penalty more than anything else.

For instance, consider the problematic logic behind bans such as this one – implicitly, it asserts that the mentally disabled lack full culpability over their actions, or rather, they lack so to the point where they can no longer be treated like ordinary citizens. Given this is true, where else does this rule apply – should a person of significant mental disability be allowed to enter into contracts, even though they cannot be held fully culpable to their consent? What of voting – is the individual in full awareness of the voting process?

Fortunately, the provisions of the 14th Amendment, along with numerous court precedent, head off this dilemma. Nonetheless, it presents a thorny double standard – if an individual cannot be held accountable to their actions, is it fair to allow them to exist freely or should they remain under constant custody of a legal guardian (like a minor) or institutionalized (like the insane)?

The Virginia law cites “significant limitations on adaptive functioning” as a criterion for prohibiting executions.

This however, raises a natural question – does this work the other way as well? Should so-called “gifted” individuals of IQs over 130 or “significant advantages on adaptive functioning” be held to a more stringent standard than those of the average individual? Would an increased awareness of one’s surroundings beyond that of a normal individual lend itself to increased culpability under the law?

Naturally, these questions sound absurd to the average observer, but they’re meant more to test the ingrained assumptions about culpability and the law, not to propose a new legal framework.

A better handling of cases with individuals of limited adaptive abilities is to correctly handle the classification of the crimes – namely, by acknowledging that an individual of limited cognative capacity most likely lacks the ability to carry out a crime of significant premeditation (thereby excluding them from the class of capital crimes in many states).

However, this does not satisfy opponents of capital punishment, namely because this reveals the true nature of laws such as that in Virgina – a transparent straw-man attack upon capital punishment from perhaps the most emotionally-loaded grounds possible.

It in fact abdicates any intellectual integrity the proponents might be required to furnish by stripping the issue of capital punishment out of all context and turning it into an issue of patent demagoguery – after all, the thought of executing the mentally retarded in the public consciousness is akin to executing a minor, even if they commit the same crime and effect the same havoc on society through such.

This however is a cowardly tactic at best – by arguing capital punishment based on exception rather the rule itself, opponents push for a system of laws based on case rather than category – a nation which is no longer governed by “laws, not men,” as Adams would have put it.

By no means is capital punishment a said-and-done issue, nor will it be any time soon. Fundamental issues about the nature of our legal system and the relation between the people and the state are at the core of this debate.

Arguing against categorical law on a case-by-case basis and parading out the rogue’s gallery is an intellectual sham. Rather than debate issues, it tugs at the heartstrings of the public consciousness, ignoring the severity of the issues at stake.

More importantly, such tactics serve to marginalize the more serious objections to the unsparing use of capital punishment (such as for want of evidence or systematic problems in its administration toward the poor) by associating objections more with demagoguery and scare-tactics than logic.

Fundamental issues like capital punishment deserve more serious treatment than the proverbial “straw man.” Its opponents should know better than this.

Steve Skutnik is a senior in physics from Palm Harbor, Fla.