Supreme Court declines to weigh IQ standards in Alabama death row case 

The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed an Alabama death row inmate’s appeal to the justices, declining to weigh how multiple IQ scores should be evaluated in capital cases for now.

In an unsigned opinion, the court said Joseph Clifton Smith’s appeal was “improvidently granted,” meaning the justices made a mistake by agreeing to take it up.   

Smith was convicted in the 1997 death of Durk Van Dam, who was beaten and killed with a hammer during a robbery. Smith has taken five IQ tests, four of which placed his IQ in the low-to-mid 70s.  

An IQ of 70 or lower is generally an indicator of intellectual disability, which would exempt people in this range from execution, alongside children, under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” the Supreme Court previously ruled.  

Smith’s results are what a lower court judge amounted to a “close case” before vacating his death sentence in 2021, determining that the error range of his lowest test score could place his actual IQ below 70. A federal appeals court affirmed the ruling in 2023.  

The discretion the high court inherently left to the states about how to define “intellectual disability” led to differing applications.  

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a concurring opinion, joined by fellow liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, that the court “should not and cannot” use Smith’s case to address........

© The Hill