Supreme Court Strikes Down I.Q. Requirement in Death Penalty Case

In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court
held the execution of “mentally retarded criminals” to be
unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. Today, by a vote of
5-4, the Court extended that ruling to invalidate a Florida statute
governing the use of I.Q. tests in death penalty cases.

At issue today in Hall v. Florida was an appeal filed
by a convicted murderer named Freddie Lee Hall, who maintains that
his capital sentence is illegitimate under that 2002 precedent due
to his intellectual disability. As evidence of this disability,
Hall presented state officials with test results showing his I.Q.
score to be 71. Under Florida law, however, Hall must, as a
threshold matter, score 70 or less on an I.Q. test before any
further consideration may be given to his intellectual disability
case.

Writing today for the majority, Justice Anthony
Kennedy struck down what he called Florida’s “rigid rule” because
it deprived Hall and others like him of a “fair opportunity to show
that the Constitution prohibits their execution.” According to the
Court, “Freddie Lee Hall may or may not be intellectually disabled,
but the law requires that he have the opportunity to present
evidence of his intellectual disability, including deficits in
adaptive functioning over his lifetime.”

Writing in dissent, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief
Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence
Thomas, criticized Kennedy for “strik[ing] down a state law based
on the evolving standards of professional societies, most notably
the American Psychiatric Association,” rather than respecting the
judgment of Florida’s voters. “Under our modern Eighth Amendment
cases,” Alito argued, “what counts are our society’s
standards—which is to say, the standards of the American people—not
the standards of professional associations, which at best represent
the views of a small professional elite.”

Kennedy, by contrast, had the following to say about the
deference due to the I.Q. threshold set by Florida lawmakers: “The
States are laboratories for experimentation, but those experiments
may not deny the basic dignity the Constitution protects.”

The Court’s opinion in Hall v. Florida is available
here.