The Supreme Court backed away from deciding what level of IQ is too low for someone to deserve capital punishment, turning away a case that tried to get the justices to decide the issue.
The court had full briefing and heard oral argument on the case earlier this term but ended up dismissing it on Thursday — and leaving lower courts to struggle with the matter.
“Today, the court declines to offer guidance on analyzing multiple IQ scores despite receiving significant briefing on the issue,” wrote Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who argued the justices owed lower courts more clarity in applying IQ rules to executions. “The court’s failure to resolve this issue will have regrettable consequences.”
The case before the justices involved Joseph Smith, convicted in Alabama of first-degree murder in 1998. An IQ test at the time showed him with a score of 72.
He was slated to be executed, but the Supreme Court in 2002 issued a ruling, the Atkins case, holding for the first time that executing those with low IQs violated the Constitution and suggesting a cutoff of 70 or below as too low to be put to death.
Smith then began a quest to prove he wasn’t intelligent enough to face the death penalty.
His five IQ tests over time showed scores ranging from 72 to 78, but an expert said because the tests have a margin of error, the 72 score could mean his IQ is as low as 69 — or below the presumed cutoff.
State courts said the execution could go forward, but federal courts intervened and ruled Smith might be below 70 IQ, so he could not be executed.
Thursday’s ruling leaves those decisions in place.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, said the high court was correct to bow out of the case, saying lower courts are the ones that should decide in each instance whether someone’s IQ is sufficient enough for execution.
“The court is not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores. All the parties here agree that the Eighth Amendment does not prescribe a single formula for weighing multiple IQ scores,” she wrote, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee.
But Justice Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, said the Supreme Court should have provided guidance about what to do with the 70 IQ threshold, multiple tests and margins of error.
He said ducking a decision leaves lower courts “unmoored.”
“The court shies away from its obligation to provide workable rules for capital cases. In doing so, the court disserves its own death-penalty jurisprudence, States’ criminal-justice systems, lower courts, and victims of horrific murders,” he wrote in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.
Justice Thomas also wrote a separate dissent complaining that Smith had gamed the system.
The justice questioned the entire line of reasoning in death penalty IQ cases, saying the Constitution doesn’t set any such standard for the death penalty. He said the 2002 ruling, Atkins, that suggested an IQ standard should be overruled.
“Nothing in our history, from 1791 to 2002, suggests that there is anything unlawful about executing murderers now protected by Atkins — let alone one such as Smith who reads at an 11th-grade level and has never scored below 71 on a single IQ test,” he said.
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.