Supreme Court To Hear Arguments Over IQ And Death Penalty

Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral argument on Dec. 10 in a case that could impact how prisoners attempt to prove the type of intellectual disability that would allow them to avoid a death sentence.

In 2002, the court held in Atkins v. Virginia that sentencing intellectually disabled convicts to death violated the Eighth Amendment’s bar on “cruel and unusual punishment.” How prisoners go about proving that disability can vary, but doing so may involve showing that their IQ falls below a particular threshold.

The case currently before the court—Hamm v. Smith—focuses on how the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit weighed multiple IQ scores in a murder case.

Joseph Clifton Smith was sentenced to death after a jury found him guilty of brutally murdering a man. Under Alabama law, Smith could demonstrate low intellectual functioning with an IQ of 70 or below and substantial deficits in adaptive behavior.

According to court filings, Smith received five IQ scores: 75, 74, 72, 78, and 74. When the case reached the 11th Circuit in 2023, the appeals court upheld a lower court decision vacating his death sentence.

The more controversial part of its decision was how it weighed Smith’s IQ scores. Although each of the scores was above the 70-point threshold, the court said it wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Smith was intellectually disabled. Given the margin of error for IQ tests, the court said Smith’s score could actually be as low as 69.

It pointed to another Supreme Court decision—Hall v. Florida—which said that courts must consider the standard error of measurement when an IQ score is close to, but above, 70. It has also said that courts should move beyond IQ and consider “adaptive deficits,” or things like changing behavior with different circumstances, when IQ scores are close to but above 70.

Considering those deficits, the appeals court said Smith shouldn’t receive the death penalty.

Alabama told the Supreme Court that this was the wrong approach and that Smith had a burden of proving disability by a preponderance of the evidence. Instead of focusing on the error range for a lower IQ score, courts should instead weigh the cumulative effect of multiple scores, Alabama said.

Katherine Robertson, an attorney with the Alabama attorney general’s office, told The Epoch Times that courts had strayed from the actual meaning of the Eighth Amendment.

“I think what we’re looking for is just a return to what the Eighth Amendment actually requires, and a move away, ultimately, from all this judge-made precedent,” she said. She add that “our position in our office philosophically has always been: if you’re competent enough to stand trial, then … how do you get special treatment when it comes to the penalty phase?”

While she wasn’t asking the Supreme Court to overrule its precedent in Atkins, she said it would have to revisit it.

“I think they’re going to have to revisit it,” she said, suggesting that it could foster a return to the true meaning of the Eighth Amendment.

In the Atkins majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens said that society viewed mentally challenged individuals as less culpable than the average criminal. Among other things, he said that those individuals may be less able to give meaningful assistance to attorneys defending them.

“Mentally retarded defendants in the aggregate face a special risk of wrongful execution,” he said.

It’s unclear how the Supreme Court will rule but Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision in 2002.

The Trump administration has also intervened in support of Alabama. It argued that the decision in Atkins broke from the Eighth Amendment’s original meaning but also afforded states flexibility in determining intellectual disability.

Smith’s attorneys, meanwhile, defended the appeals court decision and said courts should take a “holistic approach” to evaluating intellectual disability. Regardless of whether IQ scores are conclusive, they said, defendants should be able to present additional evidence surrounding their intellectual functioning.