The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Alabama’s bid to execute a death-row inmate found by lower courts to have intellectual disability, leaving those rulings intact and closing the immediate path the state sought to move forward. The court acted on Thursday in Hamm v. Smith, a case that had reached the justices after arguments held in December, according to the Associated Press.
The Supreme Court’s dismissal left in place the lower-court outcome favoring Joseph Clifton Smith, 55, who has been on death row for roughly half his life after a 1997 conviction for beating a man to death. Because the Supreme Court did not issue a new merits ruling, the last judgment by the appeals court remained in effect.
At the center of the dispute was how intellectual disability should be evaluated when a person’s IQ scores are in a “borderline” range. The Supreme Court had previously prohibited executing intellectually disabled people in a landmark 2002 decision, and later cases in 2014 and 2017 said states should consider other evidence of disability in borderline situations because of a margin of error in IQ testing, the AP reported.
In Smith’s case, the AP said the state’s appeal raised the question of what to do when a person has multiple IQ scores that are slightly above 70, a cutoff that has been widely treated as a marker for intellectual disability. The AP reported that Smith’s five IQ tests produced scores ranging from 72 to 78.
The AP also reported that Smith’s lawyers presented other evidence of intellectual disability, saying Smith had been placed in learning-disabled classes, dropped out after seventh grade, and at the time of the crime performed at levels described as like a kindergarten level in math and third-grade or fourth-grade levels in spelling and reading. Those details were part of how lower courts concluded Smith met the bar that the Supreme Court has set for execution eligibility.
The Supreme Court’s action was unusual in that the justices, after taking up the case to consider borderline-intellectual-disability handling, did not issue a substantive decision. Instead, the high court dismissed the appeal and left the appeals court’s ruling standing.
The AP reported that the majority to dismiss consisted of the three liberal justices plus Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The other four conservative justices dissented, with the AP saying they faulted the federal appeals court in Atlanta for improperly analyzing Smith’s case and also complained that their colleagues should have ordered the appeals court to reexamine it.
With the Supreme Court’s dismissal, Alabama remains blocked by the lower-court rulings from carrying out an execution against Smith under the intellectual-disability limits the Supreme Court has recognized in its prior decisions.