Supreme Court Orders New Look at IQ Scores in Death Resentencing

The US Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court to take another look at how it decided an Alabama man on death row was intellectually disabled and shouldn’t be put to death after reviewing multiple IQ scores.

In an order Monday, the court said it can’t yet assess Alabama’s appeal of the Eleventh Circuit’s decision to toss out the death sentence Joseph Clifton Smith received for beating a man to death with a hammer during a 1997 robbery.

US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled Smith had proven his intellectual disability with an IQ score of 72 because the test’s standard of error range could give him a score as low as 69. But the justices in an unsigned order said the appeals court decision can be read in two ways.

The justices said it could either be affording conclusive weight to the fact that the lower end of the standard-error range for Smith’s lowest IQ score is 69 or as approvingly cited the district court’s determination that Smith’s lowest score isn’t an outlier when considered together with his higher scores.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch said they would have heard Alabama’s appeal.

The state argued the appeals court was wrong to rely on that downward departure.

The Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia deemed it unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment to execute anyone with a mental disability. Alabama said it, and many other states, understood the significantly sub-average intellectual functioning Atkins required to be an IQ of 70.

It asked the justices to overturn or at least clarify two Supreme Court decisions — Hall v. Florida and Moore v. Texas — that set the standards for determining intellectual disability in the wake of Atkins.

In Hall, the court adopted a three-pronged definition of intellectual disability from the medical community that included significantly sub-average intellectual functioning, deficits in adaptive functioning, and the onset of deficits during the developmental period. In Moore, the court said intellectual functioning assessments have to account for the IQ’s test standard error of measurement and move one to the second prong when the lower end of an offender’s score range falls at or below 70.

The case is Hamm v. Smith, U.S., No. 23-167.