Supreme Court orders more review of Alabama’s request to execute inmate courts said is intellectually disabled

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a federal appeals court to take another look at the case of a death row inmate in Alabama whom lower courts found has an intellectual disability.

The Supreme Court could still decide to hear the underlying questions raised by the appeal in the future.

Joseph Smith was convicted and sentenced to death for a brutal murder in 1997. His case turns on how lower courts determine whether a defendant is intellectually disabled and, therefore, ineligible for the death penalty.

The lower court’s ruling in Smith’s case, the Supreme Court wrote in a brief unsigned opinion on Monday, “is unclear on this point and this court’s ultimate assessment” of the question “may depend on the basis” for that lower court’s reasoning.

Two conservatives – Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch – said they would have heard the case now.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing inmates with intellectual disabilities is a cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. That decision opened an inevitable debate about what to do with defendants who are on the border of being disabled, particularly given the margin of error in IQ tests.

A series of tests put Smith’s IQ at just over 70, a threshold referenced in the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision. But the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals noted that the number isn’t a strict cutoff and that deviation in testing could put his actual IQ slightly below 70. So it instructed a lower court to consider other factors as well.

The trial court ultimately found that Smith is disabled and the appeals court upheld that decision last year.

Smith confessed to murdering Durk Van Dam but offered conflicting versions of the crime, according to court records. The state told the Supreme Court that Smith “brutally beat” Van Dam with a hammer and saw “in order to steal $140, the man’s boots, and some tools.”

Smith’s appeal was pending at the Supreme Court for more than a year – a highly unusual delay that suggested sharp divisions among the nine justices.

The Supreme Court heard arguments earlier this month in the case of Richard Glossip, a death row inmate in Oklahoma. Glossip is asking the court to set aside his conviction after the state acknowledged its prosecution was rife with errors. The court has already agreed to review the case of a Texas death row inmate, Ruben Gutierrez.

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