Supreme Court dodges death penalty IQ question, leaving justices at odds 

WASHINGTON (CN) — In an unusual dismissal on Thursday, the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on whether an Alabama man should be disqualified for capital punishment, keeping him off death row.

The justices instead dismissed Alabama’s appeal over the standards for executing someone who is intellectually disabled as improvidently granted.

A DIG — as the term for such a decision is coined — typically garners unanimity and results in a short, sometimes single-page ruling. However, Thursday’s 5-4 decision netted a 62-page quarrel among the justices over Joseph Clifton Smith’s case and the high court’s broader ability to decide issues before it.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, said the court erroneously granted a question posed by the United States instead of parties in the legal dispute. Without an evidentiary record or lower court decision below on that question, Sotomayor said the court rightfully concluded to dismiss the case.

“There is no reason for this court to leapfrog the experts, state courts and federal lower courts to provide conclusive guidance at this level of detail in the first instance,” Sotomayor wrote in a concurring opinion joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee.

But Justice Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, said that conclusion “blinks reality,” stating that “Justice Sotomayor misunderstands basic party-presentation rules.” Alito said the court’s silence would instead exacerbate lower court confusion and lead to more requests to overrule precedent.

“The court shies away from its obligation to provide workable rules for capital cases,” Alito wrote. “In doing so, the court disserves its own death penalty jurisprudence, states’ criminal-justice systems, lower courts and victims of horrific murders.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, a George H.W. Bush appointee, penned his own dissenting opinion and joined Alito’s dissent in full. Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, and Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Donald Trump appointee, joined parts of Alito’s dissent.

Shaky standards

The high court banned the execution of individuals with mental disabilities in 2002, but Atkins v. Virginia’s malleable standard for such claims has befuddled the lower courts over the last two decades.

IQ scores are one method for determining intellectual ability, with scores below 70 indicating a disability. In Hall v. Florida, the court rejected a bright-line rule setting an IQ score requirement for Atkins claims. Two years later, in 2017, the justices unanimously threw out the use of outdated medical standards and ruled that states needed to consider the possible error range in Moore v. Texas.

Alabama said lower courts were still incorrectly assessing Atkins claims, arguing that Smith did not meet the criteria. Smith’s IQ scores have ranged between 72 and 78, but an expert testified that measurement errors could put his IQ as low as 69.

Smith was sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of Durk Van Dam. The Supreme Court previously remanded Smith’s case in 2024 for clarity on how the appeals court analyzed his various IQ scores. The 11th Circuit’s subsequent ruling was the focus of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Whole picture

The question taken up by the Supreme Court was whether the cumulative effect of Smith’s multiple IQ scores could be considered under Atkins.

Atkins requires a showing of significantly below-average general intellectual functioning. Alabama argued Smith’s one IQ score of 78 should be enough to establish that he is not intellectually disabled — Smith scored 75, 74, 72 and 74 on his other IQ tests.

Smith pushed the justices to take up a more holistic approach at oral arguments in December 2025, arguing that precedent allows evidence of adaptive functioning to come into play if a defendant has one score at or below 70.

Smith’s school records reflected little progress after first grade, and he was placed in special education classes after third grade. At that time, Smith had a full-scale IQ score of 75. After being held back in sixth grade, Smith was enrolled in “educable mentally retarded” classes for his final two years in school.

During a 2021 hearing on Smith’s Atkins claim, a doctor testified that Smith’s school records indicated a diagnosis of mild intellectual disability. A neuropsychologist told the court that Smith’s academic struggles led to behavioral problems consistent with someone who has intellectual functioning deficits.

The lower court ruled that Smith is intellectually disabled and could not be executed. Sotomayor supported the court’s holistic review, calling it consistent with precedent, the medical community’s diagnostic framework and Alabama state law.

“Ultimately, as this court has recognized, ‘[i]ntellectual disability is a condition, not a number’ and the ‘the diagnosis of [intellectual disability] is intended to reflect a clinical judgment rather than an actuarial determination,’” Sotomayor wrote. “In close cases such as this one, the inquiry may well involve a substantial amount of evidence, but that inquiry is nevertheless critical to avoid the ‘unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed’ contrary to the Eighth Amendment.”

However, Sotomayor clarified that the lower court’s conclusion was not properly before the Supreme Court.

True IQ

Alito instead advocated for various methods for estimating a defendant’s “true” IQ. He said this number could be a composite score using a multistep calculation involving statistics about tests he has taken.

If that information is unavailable, Alito said courts could use the median value of a defendant’s IQ scores or allow an expert witness to make a judgment call about the “central tendency” of various scores.

“Without clear rules for determining when multiple IQ scores are dispositive, nearly every Atkins case will devolve into an amorphous, individualized determination of whether the defendant meets an imprecisely defined notion of ‘significantly subaverage intellectual functioning’ under which the role of IQ is not clearly articulated,” Alito wrote.

In his lone dissent, Thomas advocated for a more drastic solution, calling to overrule Atkins. Thomas said the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishment was intended to prohibit enhanced death sentences including embowelling alive, beheading and quartering.

“Atkins’s rejection of ‘the historical meaning of the [Eighth] Amendmen[t]’ has denied the justice governments have given to murder victims from time immemorial,” Thomas wrote. “And it degrades the mildly intellectually disabled by putting them ‘on a level with … infants, imbeciles and domestic animals’ — those who cannot ‘have known better.’”

In a future case, Thomas said the court should restore the cruel and unusual punishment clause’s fixed meaning.

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