The Supreme Court ruled 5-3 Tuesday that a lower court’s failure to adhere to medical standards in determining the intellectual capability of an inmate on death row violated the Eighth Amendment.
In Moore v. Texas, the court addressed the question of whether the execution of an inmate after a prolonged period of incarceration, much of it spent in isolated confinement, ran afoul of the Constitution’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The high court previously ruled that the Eighth Amendment prevents states from executing people with an “intellectual disability,” but had not provided judgment about how the states should determine whether a person is disabled.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg authored the Supreme Court’s 5-3 opinion vacating the lower court’s judgment and remanded the case back to the lower court.
“Adjudications of intellectual disability should be ‘informed by the views of medical experts,'” Ginsburg wrote. “That instruction cannot sensibly be read to give courts leave to diminish the force of the medical community’s consensus.”
Cliff Sloan, counsel for the petitioner against Texas, praised the Supreme Court ruling.
“Today, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that all persons with intellectual disability are exempt from execution, and that current medical standards must be used to determine whether a person is intellectually disabled,” Sloan said. “The Supreme Court has made clear that no state may assess intellectual disability in a manner that would allow for the execution of someone who has intellectual disability under current medical standards. The Supreme Court has sensibly directed Texas courts to be informed by the medical community’s current diagnostic framework before imposing our society’s gravest sentence.”
The death penalty has become a hot-button topic at the Supreme Court in recent months as Justice Stephen Breyer has repeatedly and publicly urged the high court to reconsider the death penalty.
In Moore v. Texas, the high court’s conservative bloc — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — dissented. How Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch would have ruled on the case is not clear, as he avoided answering questions involving how he would handle specific cases and controversies that could come before the court during last week’s Senate hearings on his nomination. Gorsuch has not handled many cases involving the death penalty as a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals judge.
