The Supreme Court on Thursday chose not to weigh in on what standards states should use to assess whether a person who commits a crime must be spared the death penalty because of intellectual disabilities.
The high court dismissed on procedural grounds the case of an Alabama man who was convicted of capital murder, leaving in place a lower court ruling blocking his execution.
The majority ruled the court should not have accepted the case, which revolved around how to assess multiple IQ scores that fall above and below the cutoff allowing execution. The case was significant because many capital punishment defendants fall into this borderline territory in the 27 states that have the death penalty.
The unsigned majority opinion did not offer a rationale for its decision in Hamm v. Smith, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a concurring opinion that the case was not the proper vehicle to examine how to treat multiple IQ scores in death penalty cases and the justices did not have the necessary factual record to reach a decision. She was joined by fellow liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“The court is not equipped to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores,” Sotomayor wrote.
The ruling came over a dissent by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas and a partial dissent by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. that was joined, in part, by other conservative members of the court.
Alito wrote that by “remaining silent” the “Court exacerbates the confusion that plagues our jurisprudence in this area.”
The Supreme Court held in a major 2002 ruling that sentencing a mentally disabled person to death violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment,” but left it to states to set standards for eligibility.
In Alabama, a defendant is ineligible for execution if he or she has an IQ at or below 70 and can demonstrate the existence of significant deficits in everyday skills that occurred before adulthood. The standards are similar in many states.
The current case examined how Alabama should weigh Joseph Clifton Smith’s multiple IQ scores to determine whether he should face the death penalty after he and an accomplice robbed and killed a man in 1997. The court was also examining how far courts should go in evaluating additional evidence of mental capacity beyond IQ.
The state argued that lower courts had erred in blocking Smith’s execution by placing too much weight on his lowest IQ score, which, only when considering the margin of error, could place Smith in the ineligible range. Alabama said the court should have considered the cumulative results of five IQ tests that placed him above the cutoff. Smith scored 75, 74, 72, 78 and 74 on tests over his lifetime.
Robert M. Overing, deputy solicitor general for Alabama, told the justices during arguments in December that the aggregate scores were a better yardstick for measuring Smith’s intellectual impairment.
“He didn’t come close to proving an IQ of 70 or below,” Overing said.
Smith’s case began while he was on work release from prison in 1997. Smith and an accomplice robbed a man of $140 and killed him. A jury convicted Smith of capital murder during a robbery and sentenced him to death.
After the Supreme Court’s ruling barring the execution of intellectually disabled people, Smith filed for relief on those grounds. A federal district judge found Smith’s score of 72 indicated his IQ could be as low as 69 because the test had a three-point margin of error. For that reason, the judge ruled Smith could present additional evidence of impairment to assess his mental capacity.
In seventh grade, Smith’s school classified him as “Educable Mentally Retarded,” a term used at the time to mean he had mild intellectual disability. Smith read and did math at a low level. He never held a job or opened a bank account and had difficulty following laws, according to evidence presented at a hearing.
The court found that Smith’s “actual functioning” was comparable to someone who was intellectually disabled, so he couldn’t be sentenced to death.
An appeals court upheld that ruling. Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court, which vacated the decision and asked the appeals court to clarify whether its ruling was based solely on one low IQ score or if it also had considered other evidence and expert testimony.
The appeals court once again found that Smith was intellectually disabled and said its decision was based on a holistic approach that considered Smith’s deficits in everyday skills along with the IQ score of 72. Alabama appealed again to the Supreme Court, which agreed to take up the case.
Seth P. Waxman, an attorney for Smith, told the justices during the December arguments that the lower courts had not erred in their assessment of Smith and that it was proper to consider the single low IQ score along with additional evidence of his impairment.
“Every court in Alabama … this court and every other court in every other state that I am aware of understands that raw observed test scores is not the definition of true IQ,” Waxman said.
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