High Court Blocks Execution of Inmate With Disability

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed Alabama’s bid to execute Joseph Clifton Smith, a 55-year-old death row inmate with borderline intellectual disability, in a sharply divided 5-4 ruling that leaves intact longstanding Eighth Amendment protections for defendants with cognitive impairments.

The Court dismissed the case, Hamm v. Smith, as “improvidently granted” (DIG) — an unusual procedural move that leaves in place lower court rulings finding Smith intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution, as AP News reported.

The Case and the Inmate

Smith has been on death row for roughly half his life after his 1998 conviction for beating Durk Van Dam to death in Mobile County, Alabama. His five full-scale IQ tests produced scores of 72, 74, 75, 78, and 74 — all slightly above 70, which is widely accepted as a marker of intellectual disability. According to USA Today, Smith was placed in learning-disabled classes and dropped out after seventh grade; 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.

Smith was physically abused as a child and was diagnosed in the seventh grade as “educable mentally retarded” — the term used at the time for mild intellectual disability. He was previously incarcerated for burglary and was out on work release when he committed the 1997 murder.

The Legal Framework

The case sits at the intersection of evolving scientific understanding of intellectual disability and constitutional protections under the Eighth Amendment. The Supreme Court first prohibited executing individuals with intellectual disabilities in Atkins v. Virginia (2002). Subsequent rulings in Hall v. Florida (2014) and Moore v. Texas (2017) held that states cannot rely solely on IQ scores and must consider other evidence of adaptive functioning using current medical standards.

U.S. District Judge Callie V.S. Granade found Smith intellectually disabled in 2021, calling it a “close case” but noting that “the evidence indicates that Smith’s intelligence and adaptive functioning has been deficient throughout his life.” The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling.

The Supreme Court’s Decision

The justices had taken up the case to consider how courts should handle borderline IQ scores in Atkins claims. Rather than issue a substantive ruling, however, the Court dismissed the appeal — an unusual action suggesting that after hearing oral arguments in December 2025, a majority concluded the case was not the appropriate vehicle for resolving the question.

The majority consisted of the three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — joined by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Sotomayor wrote in her concurrence that “without the benefit of an evidentiary record or decisions below trained on the specific theories now advanced by the parties, this Court rightly concludes that it should not provide more detailed guidance.”

The four conservative justices dissented. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, accused the Court of ignoring its obligation to provide “workable rules for capital cases.” Justice Thomas went further, calling for Atkins to be overruled entirely, arguing it “has bred only confusion and absurdity.”

Broader Implications

Since Atkins v. Virginia, 144 death row prisoners have had their sentences vacated due to intellectual disability. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, more than 80% of those — 120 individuals — are people of color, with 68.8% being African American.

Disability rights groups, who closely followed the case, view the outcome as a significant victory. They had worried the Court might move toward relying solely on IQ test scores for diagnoses, which could have implications beyond the death penalty context — including eligibility for government support services such as special education, health care, and income support.

Experts from the American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association, who filed an amicus brief supporting Smith, emphasized that “intellectual disability diagnoses based solely on IQ test scores are faulty and invalid.” As scholars at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center noted, IQ is an estimate, not a precise measurement — the standard error of measurement means a score of 72 could reflect a true score as low as 67 or as high as 77.

What’s Next

For Joseph Smith, the ruling means his death sentence remains vacated; he will serve life in prison rather than face execution. The core holding of Atkins remains intact, and the Court declined to narrow or overrule it.

However, the Court provided no new guidance on how to handle borderline IQ scores, leaving lower courts to continue applying Hall and Moore on a case-by-case basis. Open questions remain: Will the Court take up another case to provide clearer guidance? Will Justice Thomas’s call to overrule Atkins gain traction if the Court’s composition shifts further to the right? And how will states like Alabama respond — will they attempt to legislate around this ruling?

The Trump administration, which backed Alabama’s position and had previously lifted the moratorium on federal executions, argued that states have significant discretion in defining intellectual disability. For now, the Court has declined to narrow that discretion — but the underlying legal questions remain unresolved.