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.

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