United States Supreme Court Sends Case of Alabama Death-Sentenced Prisoner Back to 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals

On November 4, 2024, the United States Supreme Courts released its order in the case of Hamm v. Smith, 604 U.S. ___ (2024). The petition for certiorari, filed by the State of Alabama last year, involved a prisoner named Joseph Clifton Smith whose death sentence was vacated in 2021 after a United States district court found he had intellectual disability. Mr. Smith had taken five IQ tests, four of which placed his IQ in the low- to mid-70s, the range generally accepted by experts to be indicative of intellectual disability. The 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s decision, calling it a “close case” but finding that the IQ tests and the evidence of his adaptive functioning were sufficient to support the district court’s conclusion.  

Alabama, however, appealed the decision and argued that Mr. Smith should still be executed, urging the Court to consider whether its previous decisions in favor of death-sentenced prisoners in Hall v. Florida (2014) and Moore v Texas (2019) should be clarified or overruled.  In both of those cases, the Court rejected the methods Florida and Texas used to determine intellectual disability.

The appeal had been closely watched both because of the unusual number of times the petition was distributed for conference at the Court (30 times, beginning in October 2023) and because of an amicus brief submitted by 14 state attorneys general that described the 11^th Circuit’s decision as an impermissible intrusion into state sovereignty. The amicus brief urged the Court to review the 11^th Circuit’s decision and “correct… [the Supreme Court’s] errant Eighth Amendment jurisprudence” that “improperly directs State intellectual-capacity determinations.”  

Since its decision in Furman v. Georgia (1972), the Court has evaluated whether a death penalty practice is “cruel and unusual” by looking at the values and beliefs of a changing society, a constitutional standard the Court first articulated in Trop v Dulles (1958). The amicus brief argued for an alternative approach, stating, “It is time for the Court to ground its Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in the Constitution’s text, history, and structure.”

The Court’s lengthy consideration of the case prompted speculation that this request had found a receptive audience among some members of the Court. But the per curiam order issued today did not address this question. Instead, the Court sent the case back for clarification, noting that the ultimate decision whether to accept certiorari “may depend on the basis for the Eleventh Circuit’s decision.”   Justice Thomas and Gorsuch noted that they would have accepted certiorari.