The Supreme Court dismissed a case on Thursday about how to consider intelligence tests when evaluating if a person is sufficiently intellectually disabled to be disqualified from the death penalty, effectively sparing a death row inmate in Alabama from execution.
The high court issued a brief per curiam ruling, saying it had improperly granted review in Hamm v. Smith and declining to issue a ruling on the merits. The brief unsigned ruling was accompanied by multiple opinions agreeing and disagreeing with the order, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which she said the high court was correct in declining to use this case to “address how courts must analyze multiple IQ scores under” its standard for the death penalty regarding intellectually disabled persons.
“In cases presenting multiple IQ scores, courts should continue to consider multiple IQ scores in light of this Court’s precedents and the views of medical experts. If a conflict among the States or lower courts emerges and a case properly presents the issue, it may be appropriate for this Court to weigh in with more specific guidance about the permissible method or methods by which courts must analyze such scores. The Court rightly decides that it is inappropriate to do so in this case,” Sotomayor wrote.
The case centered on Joseph Smith, who was sentenced to death after being found guilty of murder in 1997. He challenged the capital punishment under the standard set by the 2002 Supreme Court ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, which found that the death penalty, if used against people with intellectual disabilities, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Smith argued he is intellectually disabled and ineligible to be put to death.
Alabama law requires an inmate to show they have an IQ of 70 or below, along with deficits in adaptive behavior and evidence that these deficits began in childhood. Despite five IQ results showing Smith scoring between 72 and 78, a federal district court ruled that the margin of error should mean that IQ scores between 70 and 75 should meet the Atkins standard. A federal appeals court upheld the ruling, leading Alabama to the Supreme Court. The high court’s decision to dismiss the case leaves the lower court ruling in place, which makes Smith ineligible for the death penalty.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito each wrote their own dissenting opinions. Alito’s opinion was the principal dissent, being joined in full by Thomas and partially joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch. Alito wrote that the high court should have issued a ruling in the case, bemoaning the “confusion and unsound analysis in lower courts” on how to handle multiple IQ scores for determining the eligibility of the death penalty for an inmate.
“I respectfully dissent from the Court’s decision to leave this important question unanswered. At the very least, we should reverse the lower courts’ erroneous analysis of Smith’s scores and remand for a fresh consideration of his Atkins claim using any sound method. Even if our decision went no further, we would provide clarity and coherence to one aspect of our Atkins doctrine,” Alito wrote. “Instead, the Court shies away from its obligation to provide workable rules for capital cases. In doing so, the Court disserves its own death-penalty jurisprudence, States’ criminal-justice systems, lower courts, and victims of horrific murders.”
Roberts and Gorsuch joined all parts of Alito’s opinion except the one in which he explained why he would have reversed the lower court’s ruling and found “they relied on psychologically, statistically, and legally unsound analyses to conclude that Smith’s IQ is 70 or below.”
Thomas joined Alito’s dissent in full, but also wrote his own dissenting opinion in which he argued that the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins should be overruled, saying the decision has “bred only confusion and absurdity” and that “nothing in the text or history of the Constitution supports” it.
“Atkins also cannot survive this Court’s more recent stare decisis criteria because it is egregiously wrong, unworkable, and has created no legitimate reliance interests. Atkins is demonstrably erroneous. It is irreconcilable with the Eighth Amendment’s original meaning, and nothing in the common law supports it,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas also wrote that the high court “rewarded” Smith’s effort to avoid the death penalty by pushing an Atkins claim despite him not being “insufficiently intelligent to be executed.”
“He can read at an 11th grade level. He took five IQ tests and did not once receive a score of 70 or below, instead scoring 75, 74, 72, 78, and 74. The lower courts held that he could not be executed based only on the hypothetical possibility that these IQ scores were all wrong and that his IQ is in fact 70 or below. I join Justice Alito’s opinion because it persuasively explains why that approach is statistically indefensible,” Thomas wrote.
THE MAJOR SUPREME COURT DECISIONS REMAINING FOR THIS TERM
The Supreme Court’s decision to dismiss the case means the justices have punted on offering further guidance over the scope of the Atkins standard for executions of people who claim to be intellectually disabled and have taken multiple IQ tests. The issue could present itself in a future petition to the Supreme Court, but it is unknown when that would occur.
The high court will issue its rulings in the 30 remaining cases of the current term over the coming weeks, with all rulings expected to be released by the end of June.