Kentucky Supreme Court Strikes Down Commonwealth’s Death-Penalty Intellectual Disability Law

The Kentucky Supreme Court has struck down the Commonwealth’s death-penalty intellectual disability law, which required proof of an IQ score of 70 or below before a death-row prisoner or capital defendant could be found ineligible for the death penalty. The court ruled on June 14, 2018, in the case of Robert Keith Woodall (pictured) that the Commonwealth’s use of a strict IQ cutoff as a prerequisite to finding a defendant intellectually disabled violates the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Hall v. Florida (2014) and Moore v. Texas (2017). Those decisions made clear that state standards for determining intellectual disability in death-penalty cases must be “informed by the medical community’s diagnostic framework” and that use of a fixed 70-IQ cutoff score is incompatible with that framework. The Kentucky court reversed a trial court decision that had rejected Woodall’s intellectual-disability claim, and ordered the trial court to reassess that claim using a proper standard. Woodall was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998. Four years later, in Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court barred the death penalty for people with intellectual disability, and Woodall sought to have his death sentence overturned on those grounds. The trial court rejected his claim, saying he had not satisfied Kentucky’s IQ requirement. The Hall decision, however, had specifically identified Kentucky’s IQ cutoff as one the statutory provisions that would violate the Eighth Amendment, and the Kentucky high court wrote that the Commonwealth’s IQ standard “potentially and unconstitutionally exposes intellectually disabled defendants to execution.” Woodall’s attorneys praised the decision, saying, “While Kentucky was one of the first states to prohibit the execution of the intellectually disabled when it passed the statute that the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down today, that statute had long since become obsolete as the science moved forward. The Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision today to abandon that statute in favor of a more modern and scientific understanding of intellectual disability is very appropriate.” The court established new guidelines for lower courts to use in intellectual-disability hearings, including a “totality of the circumstances test,” which will examine whether defendants have the ability to learn basic skills and adapt their behavior to their circumstances.

(Caitlin McGlade, Kentucky Supreme Court rules death penalty IQ law is unconstitutional, Courier Journal, June 14, 2018; Jason Riley, Kentucky Supreme Court rules death penalty IQ law is unconstitutional, WDRB, June 14, 2018.) Read the Kentucky Supreme Court’s opinion here. See Intellectual Disability.