Capital Punishment of the Mentally Retarded in relation to A Lesson Before Dying - includes parenthetical citations and works cited.

Capital Punishment of the Mentally Retarded
A mentally retarded man is charged with a crime that he has never committed. Regardless of his mental state, he is sentenced to the death penalty, condemned to die as a "hog." The divisive idea of executing a mentally handicapped person polarizes most individuals into either fervently supporting or opposing the idea, but Ernest J. Gaines takes an eclectic combination of both ideas to form his own opinion.
Those that are proponents of capital punishment of the mentally disabled state that prisoners can easily claim to be retarded. A law statin…