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Supreme Court Arguments will be heard on Wednesday in a case that will make it harder for convicted murderers to prove that their lives should be spared because they are intellectually disabled.
The judge is considering the appeal AlabamaWho seeks to execute a man who lower federal courts found intellectually disabled and saved from execution.
In a landmark decision in 2002, the Supreme Court banned the execution of intellectually disabled people.
Joseph Clifton Smith, 55, has spent nearly half his life on death row after being convicted of beating a man to death in 1997.
At issue in Smith’s case is what happens when a person has multiple IQ scores that are slightly above 70, which has been widely accepted as a marker of intellectual disability. Smith’s scores on five IQ tests ranged from 72 to 78. His lawyers said Smith was placed in learning disabled classes and dropped out of school after the seventh grade. At the time of the offense, he did math at a kindergarten level, spelled at a third-grade level, and read at a fourth-grade level.
The Supreme Court has said in 2014 and 2017 cases that states must consider other evidence of disability in borderline cases because of the potential for error in IQ tests.
After lower courts ruled that Smith was intellectually disabled, Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court. Judges previously sent his case back to a federal appeals court atlantaWhere the judges confirmed that they had taken a “holistic” approach to Smith’s case, which appears to be in line with the High Court’s decision.
But the judges said in June they would take a fresh look at the case.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Smith had not met his burden of showing an IQ of 70 or below, and the state wrote in its brief that discussion of the holistic approach is an inappropriate extension of Supreme Court decisions.
“He has a lot of scores in the seventies,” Marshall said in a phone interview. He said the question is how to address continuity of points. “I don’t think picking and choosing people at the lower levels is ultimately the path to court,” Marshall said.
trump The administration and 20 states are supporting Alabama in the case. Solicitor General D. John Sawyer wrote on behalf of the administration, “Smith did not meet his burden of proving that his IQ was possibly 70 or less.”
Smith’s attorneys argue that lower courts followed the law in making a “holistic assessment of all relevant evidence” in a case involving borderline IQ scores.
Rights groups focusing on disability wrote in a brief supporting Smith that “diagnosing intellectual disability based solely on IQ test scores is flawed and invalid.”
Smith was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 beating death of Dirk Van Dam in Mobile County. Van Damme was found dead in his pickup truck. Prosecutors said he was beaten to death with a hammer and robbed of $150, his shoes and tools.
In 2021 a federal judge vacated Smith’s death sentence, although he acknowledged that “it’s a close case.”
Alabama law defines intellectual disability as an IQ of 70 or less as well as a significant or substantial deficit in adaptive behavior and the onset of those issues before the age of 18.
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Reported from Chandler montgomeryAlabama.