Justices unite over ‘intellectual disability.’
The U.S. Supreme Court is often divided, but on one little-noticed point last week, it was unanimous: the term “mental retardation” is no longer appropriate to use. This may seem trivial and way too late. Mental health professionals and most of the rest of us long ago abandoned that phrase, which echoes insulting schoolyard epithets.
But at an institution whose decisions have broad impact, the court’s action is a significant sign of society’s progress toward treating each other with dignity.
The court’s shift came Tuesday in Hall v. Florida, which struck down Florida’s method for determining whether a death row inmate who claims intellectual disability should be executed. On that issue, the court split 5-4.
But on the second page of the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy laid down the law on terminology: “Previous opinions of this court have employed the term ‘mental retardation.’ This opinion uses the term ‘intellectual disability’ to describe the identical phenomenon.” Justice Samuel Alito Jr. adopted the same term in his dissent. As recently as 2013, the court routinely used “mental retardation” in its opinions.
Advocacy groups such as the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and The Arc — both of which once had “retardation” or “retarded” in their names — applauded the shift. In addition to the symbolic importance, they said they can now use “intellectual disability” in legal briefs. Until last week’s decision, they used the outdated terminology to track the wording of precedents and avoid confusion.
“Mentally retarded” was once viewed as an improvement over terms such as “feeble minded.” But word preferences evolve, and “intellectual disability” is the preferred term now.
A major impetus for change came in 2010, when Congress passed “Rosa’s Law,” which substituted “intellectual disability” for “mental retardation” in several federal laws. It was named for Rosa Marcellino, a Maryland girl with Down syndrome. Her family campaigned for the change after hearing “retard” used too often. As her brother Nick put it, “When you think about it, what you call people is how you treat people.”
The Supreme Court has been an engine for change in terminology before. In 1989, the late Justice Thurgood Marshall pointedly began using “Afro American” to describe people of his own race. He opted for Afro American because it was in dictionaries, even though “African American” was gaining currency.
“I spent most of my life fighting to get Negro spelled with a capital N,” Marshall said at the time. The longtime civil rights advocate realized then, as Justice Kennedy did last week, that at the Supreme Court, words matter — a lot.
Tony Mauro is Supreme Court correspondent for The National Law Journal and the Supreme Court Brief. He is a member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.