A man convicted of a 1997 murder in Alabama will be spared execution after the US Supreme Court yesterday kept in place a judicial finding that the inmate is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for the death penalty.
The justices dismissed an appeal by Alabama officials of a lower court’s approach to determining Joseph Clifton Smith’s intellectual capacity. That method involved weighing multiple intelligence quotient, or IQ, test scores alongside expert testimony.
Under a 2002 Supreme Court precedent in a case called Atkins v Virginia, executing an intellectually disabled person violates the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
At issue in Smith’s case was whether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores in assessing a death-row inmate’s intellectual disability.
Smith, now 55, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of a man named Durk Van Dam in Alabama’s Mobile County. Smith fatally beat the man with a hammer and saw in order to steal his boots, tools and $140, according to evidence in the case. The victim’s body was found in an isolated area.
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