A Rare Win at the Supreme Court for a Death-Row Prisoner

It was a limited victory, but it broke with the high court’s long-standing favor toward the death penalty.

The Supreme Court took the unusual step on Thursday of dismissing a case that it had already heard, handing a rare win to a death-row prisoner and avoiding a ruling that could make it harder for other prisoners with intellectual disabilities to avoid execution.

In rare cases, the justices agree to hear a case, only to conclude later that it would be inappropriate or unnecessary for the high court to decide the case. When this happens, the court can decline to rule for either side and instead hold that the case is “dismissed as improvidently granted.” For brevity’s sake, most observers typically say these cases were “DIG’d.”

The court does not typically announce the vote breakdown when DIG-ing a case. Thanks to the concurring and dissenting opinions, it can be readily inferred this time. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch all dissented from the court’s move. Logically, that means Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined with the court’s liberals to nix the case.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor applauded the court’s decision to avoid a ruling. “Here, neither Alabama nor the United States seriously contends that the District Court’s finding was clearly erroneous,” she explained in a concurring opinion joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “For good reason: It was not.”

Alito argued in dissent that the lower courts had misapplied precedents on executing people with intellectual disabilities and criticized his colleagues for not clarifying them. “By instead remaining silent, the Court exacerbates the confusion that plagues our jurisprudence in this area,” he claimed.

Thursday’s decision is good news for Joseph Smith, the death-row inmate in this particular case. Since the Supreme Court issued no actual ruling, the lower court decision where he prevailed is the final word. An Alabama jury convicted him of murdering Durk Van Dam in 1997 in a dispute over money. After receiving a death sentence from the trial court, Smith and his lawyers challenged the death sentence in court by claiming that he was intellectually disabled. They pointed to IQ tests where he scored in the mid-to-high 70s, as well as other evidence of his poor educational performances and low mental aptitudes.

It is a long-standing principle of the Anglo-American legal system that people with mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities are less culpable for their crimes. Lord Blackstone, the famed eighteenth-century judge and legal commentator, noted in the parlance of his era that “idiots and lunatics are not chargeable for their own acts, if committed when under these incapacities: no, not even for treason itself.” He........

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