Supreme Court hears Alabama’s appeal to execute a man found to be intellectually disabled

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday in a case that could make it harder for convicted murderers to show their lives should be spared because they are intellectually disabled.

The justices are taking up an appeal from Alabama, which wants to put to death a man who lower federal courts found is intellectually disabled and shielded from execution.

The Supreme Court prohibited execution of intellectually disabled people in a landmark ruling in 2002.

Joseph Clifton Smith, 55, has been on death row roughly half his life after his conviction for beating a man to death in 1997.

The issue in Smith’s case is what happens when a person has multiple IQ scores that are slightly above 70, which has been widely accepted as a marker of intellectual disability. Smith’s five IQ tests produced scores ranging from 72 to 78. Smith had been placed in learning-disabled classes and dropped out of school after seventh grade, his lawyers said. At the time of the crime, he performed math at a kindergarten-level, spelled at a third-grade level and read at a fourth-grade level.

The Supreme Court has held in cases in 2014 and 2017 that states should consider other evidence of disability in borderline cases because of the margin of error in IQ tests.

Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court after lower courts ruled that Smith is intellectually disabled. The justices had previously sent his case back to the federal appeals court in Atlanta, where the judges affirmed that they had taken a “holistic” approach to Smith’s case, seemingly in line with the high court ruling.

But the justices said in June they would take a new look at the case.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Smith hasn’t met his burden of showing an IQ of 70 or below, and the state wrote in its brief that the discussion of a holistic approach is an unjustified expansion of the Supreme Court rulings.

“He has multiple scores in the seventies,” Marshall said in a phone interview. He said the question is about how to address a continuum of scores. “I don’t think picking and choosing those at the bottom are the way that the court will ultimately go,” Marshall said.

The Trump administration and 20 states are supporting Alabama in the case. Smith “did not meet his burden of proving his IQ was likely 70 or below,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration.

Smith’s lawyers argue the lower courts followed the law in conducting a “holistic assessment of all relevant evidence” in a case with borderline IQ scores.

Rights groups focused on disabilities wrote in a brief supporting Smith that “intellectual disability diagnoses based solely on IQ test scores are faulty and invalid.”

Smith was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 beating death of Durk Van Dam in Mobile County. Van Dam was found dead in his pickup truck. Prosecutors said he had been beaten to death with a hammer and robbed of $150, his boots and tools.

A federal judge in 2021 vacated Smith’s death sentence, though she acknowledged “this is a close case.”

Alabama law defines intellectual disability as an IQ of 70 or below, along with significant or substantial deficits in adaptive behavior and the onset of those issues before the age of 18.

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Chandler reported from Montgomery, Alabama.