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Supreme Court Arguments are scheduled to be heard Wednesday in a case that could make it more challenging for convicted murderers to avoid execution by claiming intellectual disability.
The case stems from an appeal AlabamaIts purpose is to execute a person who has been declared intellectually disabled by lower federal courts.
The appeal directly challenges existing legal protections for individuals with intellectual disabilities stemming from a landmark 2002 decision Handicap faced with death penalty,
Joseph Clifton Smith, 55, has spent nearly half his life on death row after being convicted of beating a man to death in 1997.
The issue in Smith’s case is what happens when a person has multiple numbers of IQ The score is slightly above 70, which is 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 her case back to the federal appeals court in Atlanta, where judge Confirmed they have 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.
The Trump 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.