The conservative-majority Supreme Court could decide if IQ tests can rule out an intellectual disability — a move that could echo Project 2025 — and potentially change how states execute disabled people.
The high court will hear Alabama death penalty case Hamm v. Smith starting Wednesday and has prompted the question: “Will Trump’s justices care?” Mother Jones reported on Friday.
The case has focused on Joseph Clifton Smith, who was convicted of murder in 1997, and was previously educated for an intellectual disability.
“Smith had five documented IQ test scores by the time he was tried, all around the bottom five percent of the population—four of which, his legal team has argued, fall in the range of mild intellectual disability,” Mother Jones reported.
But the state of Alabama has disagreed and said that “anyone scoring 70 or above on one test, its attorney general contends, is intelligent enough to execute. In 2022, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument—setting the stage for a Supreme Court turnaround on IQ and capital punishment.”
The high court has previously argued that IQ tests alone cannot give a comprehensive view and holistically determine a person’s intellectual disability with the 2002 case Atkins v. Virginia. But the court’s conservative majority has grown since this ruling and now it’s unclear how the justices will view the previous decision.
“The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case is perhaps unexpected, given the clear precedent in its rulings that IQ tests are not enough to establish intellectual disability, and may signal a likely break with precedent,” Mother Jones reported.
The decision could also signify a push towards the initiatives in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint and detailed transition plan that outlines far-right policy changes across the federal government.
“A decision that effectively overturns the Court’s past rulings on intellectual disability and the death penalty would encourage states to define down intellectual disability, and any safeguards that come with it, in their criminal justice systems—in line with a wider push, echoed by conservative proposals like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to strip disability protections from schools, workplaces, and other sites of public life,” according to Mother Jones.
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