The Supreme Court on Thursday abruptly dismissed Alabama’s bid to execute death row prisoner Joseph Clifton Smith, leaving in place lower court findings that he is intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be put to death. The move was procedural, not a ruling on the underlying constitutional question, so Smith technically remains on death row even as the state is blocked from carrying out his sentence for now.
According to The Associated Press, Smith, now 55, has spent about half his life on Alabama’s death row following his 1997 conviction. His legal team put five IQ tests before the courts, with scores between 72 and 78, and pointed to school records showing he was placed in learning-disabled classes and left school after the seventh grade. Those details became central to the federal decisions that now shield him from execution.
What the Supreme Court did
The case arrived at the court as Hamm v. Smith, No. 24-872. The justices ultimately recorded that the "writ of certiorari [was] dismissed as improvidently granted," a procedural step that leaves the appeals court judgment intact. According to the Supreme Court docket, the dismissal came in a short per curiam entry, backed up by a concurrence and several written dissents instead of a single full-dress opinion on the merits.
How the lower courts ruled
A federal district judge, after holding an evidentiary hearing, granted Smith relief and vacated his death sentence. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit later affirmed, finding that the district court did not clearly err in deciding Smith is intellectually disabled. As the Eleventh Circuit opinion explains, the court weighed his IQ scores alongside expert testimony and evidence about his adaptive functioning, taking a holistic approach consistent with the Atkins framework.
The crime and the state's position
Smith was convicted in Mobile County in 1997 of robbing and killing Durk Van Dam, according to trial records and subsequent appellate filings. In a press release, the Alabama Attorney General’s office defended its push to revive the death sentence, arguing that Smith’s cluster of IQ scores put him above the state’s 70-point cutoff and accusing the Eleventh Circuit of leaning on hypotheticals rather than the actual test data. Those arguments are laid out in materials from the Alabama Attorney General’s Office.
How the justices lined up
The court’s internal split was visible in the paperwork. The Supreme Court docket reflects a per curiam dismissal, along with a concurrence by Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson, and separate dissents from Justices Alito and Thomas. Parts of Alito’s dissent drew support from the Chief Justice and Justice Gorsuch. Together, those writings highlight a sharp divide over how existing precedent should apply in close, borderline intellectual-disability cases.
Why it matters
The fight in Hamm v. Smith centered on how courts may treat multiple IQ scores that hover just above the usual 70-point cutoff. That issue has been percolating since Oyez’s summary of Atkins v. Virginia, the 2002 decision that barred execution of people with intellectual disabilities, and later cases instructing judges to factor in clinical judgment and adaptive functioning, not just raw numbers from test sheets. Legal analysts at SCOTUSblog have treated Hamm as a key skirmish over how rigidly states can cling to numerical cutoffs in capital cases.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall stated in his press release that "Joseph Smith is not intellectually disabled" and stood by the state’s reading of the IQ results. For now, though, the Supreme Court’s procedural exit leaves the federal rulings intact, keeping Smith’s death sentence on ice while Alabama figures out what, if anything, it can do next.
