The man at the center of this case, Joseph Clinton Smith, was found to have an intellectual disability while in school.Nevada Department of Corrections/AP
On Thursday, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to dismiss the Hamm v. Smith case, effectively upholding its rulings that people with intellectual disabilities should not be executed, and that IQ tests alone are not enough to determine whether someone has an intellectual disability. A one sentence, unsigned opinion held that the court’s earlier decision to hear the case was “improvidently granted.” Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
“The Court is not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a concurrence, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “All the parties here agree that the Eighth Amendment does not prescribe a single formula for weighing multiple IQ scores.”
Intellectual disabilities, the Supreme Court has ruled, should be determined holistically, as I explained in an article previewing December’s oral arguments in Hamm v. Smith:
The Supreme Court has previously stated that IQ tests alone fail to holistically determine intellectual disability, in 2002’s Atkins v. Virginia—which also established that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the Eighth Amendment—reaffirmed in 2014 in Hall v. Florida, and most recently in 2017’s Moore v. Texas.
The state of Alabama argued Smith could be executed because he had no intellectual disability. As I previously wrote, Smith had shown that he arguably does:
Long before he was convicted of murder in 1997, Joseph Clifton Smith was placed in schooling for an intellectual disability. Smith had five documented IQ test scores by the time he was tried, all around the bottom five percent of the population—four of which, his legal team has argued, fall in the range of mild intellectual disability.
“The Court’s review is further complicated by the fact that the issue of how to consider multiple IQ scores was neither meaningfully raised nor passed upon below,” Sotomayor wrote.
Even though the court has banned executing people with intellectual disabilities, some advocates have raised concerns it still happens. For instance, Alabama executed Willie Smith in 2021, who some argued had an intellectual disability—though, like the Smith at the center of the Hamm v. Smith case, this was debated.
This gray area—judging who is disabled enough to be spared, and who is fit to be killed—raises questions about the ethics of the death penalty generally, including how racial bias may shape these determinations. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, nearly three out of four people sentenced to death under federal prosecution are people of color.
“In a country that created a system of law based around racial hierarchy, it’s no wonder that people of color, particularly Black people, are more likely to be executed, especially if they are disabled,” says Dom Kelly, the CEO of the disability justice organization New Disabled South. “In 2026, capital punishment is the next generation of racial lynching and the state’s way of keeping the eugenics movement alive.”
In a dissenting opinion signed by no other justice, Thomas blatantly called for the Atkins ruling to be rolled back. “As this case shows,” Thomas wrote, “Atkins has bred only confusion and absurdity. Nothing in the text or history of the Constitution supports Atkins. It should be overruled.”
Smith, who was convicted of capital murder in 1998 for beating a man to death during a robbery, is expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
