Billy Daniel Raulerson, Jr. v. Warden, Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison

Georgia is the only state in the Union that requires a capital defendant to prove intellectual disability (formerly called mental retardation) by a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. Discovery in the instant federal habeas proceeding established that in the thirty years during which Georgia has maintained this unique burden of proof, not a single capital defendant has been able to establish intellectual disability in a contested case. This case presents the following question: Whether this Court’s unanimous holding in Cooper v. Oklahoma, 517 U.S. 348 (1996), clearly established that Georgia could not impose the burden of requiring proof of intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt, particularly when state supreme courts in Indiana, Tennessee, and other states recognized that Cooper would not allow their states to require a defendant to prove intellectual disability even by a lower standard of clear and convincing evidence.