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Ark. Code Ann. § 5-4-605

Mitigating circumstances

Applied in 26 court decisions — leading case Penry v. Lynaugh (1989)

Most recently applied in James Derrick Grubbs v. State of Arkansas (January 2020)

Acts 1975, No. 280, § 1304; A.S.A. 1947, § 41-1304.

How often courts cite this section

1988199020002010202040
citing decisions per year

Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.

A mitigating circumstance includes, but is not limited to, the following:

(1) The capital murder was committed while the defendant was under extreme mental or emotional disturbance;

(2) The capital murder was committed while the defendant was acting under an unusual pressure or influence or under the domination of another person;

(3) The capital murder was committed while the capacity of the defendant to appreciate the wrongfulness of his or her conduct or to conform his or her conduct to the requirements of law was impaired as a result of mental disease or defect, intoxication, or drug abuse;

(4) The youth of the defendant at the time of the commission of the capital murder;

(5) The capital murder was committed by another person and the defendant was an accomplice and his or her participation was relatively minor; or

(6) The defendant has no significant history of prior criminal activity.

Current official text: Arkansas General Assembly. Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Arkansas statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.