On Tuesday, Buzzfeed reported that the US Supreme Court had handed out a decision that overruled a state law that limits the bar on condemned prisoners with intellectual disabilities. The viral news site said that the decision could impact the plans of other states who have adopted laws similar to Florida's, who have based their criterion on deeming a condemned prisoner exempted from execution on his intelligence quotient. The state of Florida currently bars the execution of death row inmates who have an IQ not more than 70.
Ruling that the Florida law was unconstitutional based on its IQ requirement, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote on behalf of himself, and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, said that the panel had conducted an examination of the framework that was followed by psychiatrists and other professionals in diagnosing intellectual disability, which include the study on standard error of measurement, or SEM. The panel reportedly found that majority of the states have rejected the IQ cutoff, and that there was a trend observed toward recognizing the SEM, which Kennedy wrote are strong evidence that the society does not regard the cutoff as humane or proper to solely decide whom to exempt from being executed. Kennedy said that the state of Florida should not exempt a condemned prisoner from being executed without other evidence aside from his low IQ that he is intellectually disabled.
He said, "The flaws in Florida's law are the result of the inherent error in IQ tests themselves. An IQ score is an approximation, not a final and infallible assessment of intellectual functioning."
On the other hand, Justice Samuel Alito, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, dissented from the court's decision, especially on the majority of the justices' understanding of a 2002 case, its reliance on positions that were adopted by private trade associations, and the assessment of what the laws of the states and any trend might be.
Alito wrote, "[T]he resolution of this case should be straightforward: Just as there was no methodological consensus among the States at the time of Atkins, there is no such consensus today. And in the absence of such a consensus, we have no basis for holding that Florida's method contravenes our society's standards of decency."
