U.S. Supreme Court upholds ruling sparing Alabama death row inmate from execution

The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday rejected a move by Alabama to overrule lower court rulings that an Alabama death row inmate is ineligible for execution due to intellectual disabilities.

In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that it had “improvidently granted” a writ of certiorari in Hamm v. Smith, which meant that it first agreed to hear the case but later decided that it should not have been accepted.

The case hinged on the meaning of IQ tests taken by Joseph Clifton Smith, sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of Durk Van Dam and one of several factors used to determine intellectual disability. The U.S. Supreme Court declared in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002 that the death penalty could not be used on those with intellectual disabilities.

Reviewing tests taken by Smith and other circumstances, lower district courts ruled that he could have an IQ under 70, which would render him ineligible for the death penalty. The Alabama attorney general’s office argued that Smith had scored higher than 70 on several IQ tests.

The majority did not issue an opinion with its ruling. In a concurrence joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a member of the majority, wrote that the court was “not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores.”

“All the parties here agree that the Eighth Amendment does not prescribe a single formula for weighing multiple IQ scores,” Sotomayor wrote.  “All the parties also agree that Atkins gave States the primary role in ‘developing appropriate ways to enforce’ Atkins.”

Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas issued dissenting opinions in the case.

A message was sent to the Smith’s attorneys on Thursday seeking comment.

Smith was administered five IQ tests whose scores ranged from 72 to 78. A score of 70 is the cutoff that suggests someone is intellectually disabled, but the results also have a margin of error. Smith’s attorneys argued that his true score could be less than 70, which makes him intellectually disabled and ineligible for the death penalty.

The case has been before the federal courts for the past two decades, including a couple of reversals at the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The same federal court that initially denied his appeal ruled that Smith was intellectually disabled in 2021 not only based on the results of the IQ tests but also based on other evidence related to his behavior and vacated his execution.

Alabama lost an appeal with the 11th Circuit, but the U.S. Supreme Court returned the case to the appeals court in May 2023 to rule on whether Smith was intellectually disabled and be spared the death penalty based on the scores he received on multiple IQ tests.

Judges at the 11th Circuit upheld their earlier decision and said that it based the decision not only on the scores but also on Smith’s “adaptive functioning.”

Repeating comments she made in a December hearing, Sotomayor noted that Alabama did not raise the issue of assessing multiple IQ tests when the case was first taken up in federal court. She also said that the courts have decided it is appropriate to consider all scores to decide whether a person is intellectually disabled.

“Ultimately, as this Court has recognized, ‘intellectual disability is a condition, not a number’ and the ‘the diagnosis of [intellectual disability] is intended to reflect a clinical judgment rather than an actuarial determination,’” Sotomayor

In his dissent, Thomas called for Atkins to be overturned and that the courts should not even consider intellectual disability as grounds for an Eighth Amendment claim against the death penalty.

“Executing someone with a particular IQ does not implicate a ‘method’ of execution at all,” Thomas said. “It certainly does not implicate a method that rises to the level of deliberate and unusual torture. It is therefore beyond the scope of the Eighth Amendment.”

In his dissent, joined by Thomas and joined in part by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, Alito argued the lower courts “did not apply any defensible method to determine Smith’s IQ.”

“To the contrary, they relied on psychologically, statistically, and legally unsound analyses to conclude that Smith’s IQ is 70 or below,” he wrote. “At the very least, we should reverse and remand to give the lower courts an opportunity to perform a proper analysis.”