{"id":27,"date":"2026-05-24T15:11:41","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T15:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=27"},"modified":"2026-05-24T15:11:41","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T15:11:41","slug":"court-sidesteps-death-row-iq-dispute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"Court sidesteps death-row IQ dispute"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Supreme Court on Thursday left in place a ruling by a federal appeals court in favor of an Alabama man who has been on that state\u2019s death row for more than two decades. In a one-sentence, unsigned , the court dismissed Alabama\u2019s petition for review in Hamm v. Smith<\/em> as \u201cimprovidently granted\u201d \u2013 that is, without deciding it. That order leaves undisturbed a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit holding that Joseph Smith is intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be executed.<\/p>\n

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The vote was effectively 5-4. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a 24-page dissent that Justice Clarence Thomas (who also wrote his own 16-page dissent) joined in full and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined in part. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a 22-page concurring opinion, which was joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, agreeing with the decision to dismiss the case.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A quarter-century ago, in , the Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment\u2019s ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits the execution of people who are intellectually disabled. The issue in Smith\u2019s case was how and whether courts should assess a defendant\u2019s claim under\u00a0Atkins<\/em>\u00a0when he has taken multiple IQ tests.<\/p>\n

The state of Alabama contended that the lower court, in throwing out Smith\u2019s death sentence, focused too heavily on the individual results of each of Smith\u2019s five IQ tests, when the cumulative effect of his IQ scores indicates that he is not intellectually disabled. Smith countered that the lower court did not rely on \u201ca single IQ score\u201d to reach its conclusion and instead looked at a broad array of evidence.<\/p>\n

Smith was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 robbery and murder of Durk Van Dam. After Smith\u2019s appeals in the state courts were unsuccessful, he went to federal court. In the wake of the court\u2019s decision in Atkins<\/em>, Smith argued that he was intellectually disabled and could not be executed. A federal district judge in Mobile, Alabama, threw out Smith\u2019s death sentence, and the 11th Circuit upheld that ruling.<\/p>\n

The state appealed to the Supreme Court, which in November 2024 to the court of appeals for it to clarify the basis for its decision. Thomas and Gorsuch indicated then that they would have taken up the case and heard oral arguments then, without waiting for the lower court to weigh in.<\/p>\n

When the case returned to the 11th Circuit, that court once again\u00a0set aside Smith\u2019s death sentence. Smith had obtained five IQ scores, ranging from 72 to 78, and his intellectual-disability claim hinged in part on whether his IQ was 70 or lower. The 11th Circuit emphasized that it had not thrown out Smith\u2019s death sentence simply because the margin of error for his lowest IQ score (72) would put his IQ at 69. Instead, it said, it had upheld the district court\u2019s decision that Smith is intellectually disabled \u201cbased on the complete record, including any relevant expert testimony.\u201d The district court, the 11th Circuit stressed, was not clearly wrong (the standard for reviewing factual findings by the district court) when it found \u201cthat Smith suffered from significantly subaverage intellectual function, that he had significant and substantial deficits in adaptive behavior, and that he manifested those qualities before he turned 18.\u201d<\/p>\n

In February 2025, the state\u00a0returned to the Supreme Court, again seeking to have the justices step in. In\u00a0, the justices granted the state\u2019s petition for review and agreed to decide \u201c[w]hether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores in assessing\u201d a claim that a capital defendant is intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be executed.<\/p>\n

The justices heard oral argument in December, but on Thursday they threw the case out without deciding it.<\/p>\n

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In Sotomayor\u2019s view, the court was correct in dismissing the case. She noted that the litigants agreed on two important points. First, \u201cthe Eighth Amendment does not prescribe a single formula for weighing multiple IQ scores.\u201d Second, under Atkins<\/em>, states have the primary role in determining how to enforce that case\u2019s ban on executing inmates with intellectual disabilities.<\/p>\n

But what the litigation in the lower courts did not do, she continued, was focus on \u201chow to consider multiple IQ scores,\u201d and the lower courts in this case did not \u201cspecifically address[] whether a court must consider the \u2018cumulative effect\u2019 of Smith\u2019s IQ scores by combining them using a specific method, or whether one method is better than another, or even how a court should go about deciding which method is preferable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, she continued, \u201cit does not appear that a single state legislature or court or Federal Court of Appeals has adopted\u201d the rule that Alabama now proposes, \u201cnor has any adopted a rule prohibiting courts from assessing multiple scores holistically without combining them, just as the District Court did here.\u201d Therefore, she concluded, the Supreme Court properly \u201cexercise[d] caution and decline[d] to adopt any such rules now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In his solo dissent, Thomas argued that the court\u2019s decision in Atkins<\/em> is \u201cdemonstrably erroneous\u201d and should be overruled altogether. He contended that the Eighth Amendment\u2019s ban on cruel and unusual punishment applies only to methods<\/em> of execution and does not extend to claims like Smith\u2019s. \u201cNothing in our history, from 1791 to 2002,\u201d when Atkins<\/em> was decided, \u201csuggests that there is anything unlawful about executing murderers now protected by Atkins<\/em>\u2014let alone one such as Smith who reads at an 11th-grade level and has never scored below 71 on a single IQ test.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his dissent, Alito outlined several different ways that courts could determine the \u201ctrue\u201d IQ score for a defendant who has taken multiple IQ tests \u2013 for example, calculating a \u201ccomposite\u201d score, using the median score, or having an expert witness determine a score. \u201cAny one of these approaches provides a reasonable way to evaluate whether a defendant\u2019s IQ is 70 or below in Atkins<\/em> cases involving multiple scores. And when a court using a reasonable method concludes that a defendant\u2019s \u2018true\u2019 IQ is above 70, it may reject an Atkins<\/em> claim solely on that ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a part of his dissent that Roberts and Gorsuch did not join, Alito argued that the justices should reverse the 11th Circuit\u2019s ruling in Smith\u2019s favor and send the case back to the lower courts for them \u201cto perform a proper analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, Alito contended that the Supreme Court\u2019s failure to decide Smith\u2019s case \u201cwill have regrettable consequences. Without clear rules for determining when multiple IQ scores are dispositive, nearly every Atkins<\/em> case will devolve into an amorphous, individualized determination of whether the defendant meets an imprecisely defined notion of \u2018significantly subaverage intellectual functioning\u2019 under which the role of IQ is not clearly articulated.\u201d Such a \u201ccase-by-case approach without categorical IQ rules \u2026 runs contrary to Atkins<\/em>\u2019s very premise,\u201d Alito wrote.<\/p>\n

Read more \u201cShadow docket\u201d reform?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court on Thursday left in place a ruling by a federal appeals court in favor of an Alabama man who has been on that state\u2019s death row for more than two decades. In a one-sentence, unsigned , the court dismissed Alabama\u2019s petition for review in Hamm v. Smith as \u201cimprovidently granted\u201d \u2013 that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-court-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCourt sidesteps death-row IQ dispute - American Service Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=27\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Court sidesteps death-row IQ dispute - American Service Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Supreme Court on Thursday left in place a ruling by a federal appeals court in favor of an Alabama man who has been on that state\u2019s death row for more than two decades. 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