The Supreme Court grappled on Wednesday with how courts consider multiple intelligence quotient tests when evaluating if a person is sufficiently intellectually disabled to be disqualified from the death penalty, as Alabama seeks to reverse a lower court that blocked the execution of a convicted murderer.
The justices heard arguments in Hamm v. Smith over how courts should handle multiple IQ tests when evaluating if someone on death row should be spared from execution due to an intellectual disability. The high court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia found that the death penalty, if used against people with intellectual disabilities, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Robert Overing, the lawyer for Alabama, asked the high court to allow the execution of Joseph Smith and provide “meaningful ground rules for how to handle multiple” IQ scores when looking at the Atkins standard.
“The Court can then supply a durable rule of decision by which a state can adopt a reasonably reliable method for handling multiple IQ scores that, when it suggests the offender’s IQ is greater than 70, his sentence does not violate Atkins. Here, every identified method of handling multiple IQ scores favors the conclusion that Smith is not intellectually disabled,” Overing told the justices Wednesday.
Smith was sentenced to the death penalty after being found guilty of murder in 1997, but he challenged the capital punishment under the Atkins standard, arguing that he is intellectually disabled. Alabama law requires an inmate to show he has an IQ of 70 or below, along with deficits in adaptive behavior and evidence that these deficits began in childhood.
Despite five IQ results showing Smith scoring between 72 and 78, a federal district court ruled that the margin of error should mean that IQ scores between 70 and 75 should meet the Atkins standard. A federal appeals court upheld the ruling, leading Alabama to the Supreme Court.
Smith’s lawyer, Seth Waxman, argued the lower courts had properly considered IQ scores, along with other evidence presented by the inmate, when it ruled his client to be intellectually disabled and not eligible for capital punishment.
“Every court in Alabama and this Court and every other court in every other state that I am aware of understands that raw observed test scores is not the definition of true IQ,” Waxman argued before the high court.
During questioning, Overing was asked by Chief Justice John Roberts about if the state would consider an inmate as having an IQ over 70 if he had multiple scores below 70 but one above 70, to which Overing responded that it would be on the inmate to prove the one score about 70 is not an overestimate. Roberts expressed concern that such a rule would be too “results-oriented.”
“You can see why that might be regarded as a little results-oriented. When you have scores above 70, you want to average them and discount the one below, but when they’re all below, you don’t do that. You instead say you’ve got to look at all these other factors?” Roberts asked Overing.
Overing rejected the concern that such a ruling by the high court would be results-oriented, arguing “someone’s best score is the best representation of their capacity.”
Waxman also faced skepticism from the justices over his arguments, with Justice Samuel Alito questioning his assertion that there is a national consensus on how to handle multiple IQ tests in the manner the district court decided.
“How are we to determine what the national consensus is based on state court decisions that have struggled, that are struggling to understand what this Court has said?” Alito questioned Waxman.
Waxman responded that state courts have looked to Supreme Court precedent that “to determine substantially sub-average intellectual functioning, we look at all probative evidence, including, of course, the test results from properly administered IQ tests.”
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Wednesday’s arguments marked the final oral arguments of the year for the Supreme Court, with the justices scheduled to return for arguments on Jan. 12, 2026, and continue hearing cases this term through the end of April 2026.
The high court is expected to issue a ruling in Hamm v. Smith in the coming months, with all decisions for this term expected to be released by the end of June 2026.
