IQ Testing in Death Penalty Cases Was Ruled Unconstitutional by Supreme Court

Given the complexity of “intelligence,” and capital punishment's unsurpassable severity, it makes intuitive sense that applying the death penalty could never be simple. The Supreme Court ruled today that Florida's interpretation of the 2002 case Atkins v. Virginia was unconstitutional, because the state was reducing intelligence to an IQ score.

In the 2002 case, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute inmates with intellectual disabilities, which Florida had interpreted as anyone who scored 70 or below on an IQ test, and would not admit other evidence of intellectual disability if the inmate scored 70 or above. In a 5-4 ruling Tuesday, the justices said that this rule “disregards established medical practice in two interrelated ways,” which Justice Anthony Kennedy outlined in the decision:

“It takes an IQ score as final and conclusive evidence of a defendant’s intellectual capacity, when experts would consider other evidence; and it relies on a purportedly scientific measurement of a defendant’s abilities, while refusing to recognize that measurement’s inherent imprecision. While professionals have long agreed that IQ test scores should be read as a range, Florida uses the test score as a fixed number, thus barring further consideration of other relevant evidence, e.g., deficits in adaptive functioning, including evidence of past performance, environment, and upbringing.”

The court's ruling means that a margin of error has to be applied to the results of IQ tests administered to Freddie Lee Hall, who was sentenced to death for murdering a pregnant woman and deputy sheriff in 1978. In nine IQ evaluations over 40 years, Hall had scored between 60 and 80 on IQ tests, and in 1991, a Florida court wrote that Hall had been “mentally retarded his entire life,” which was the terminology used at the time. Hall remained on death row, because capital punishment was not yet prohibited in such instances. After the passage of Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, Hall's IQ scores were consistently above the threshold of 70, but not consistently outside of the range of the 5-point margin of error.

From 1984 to 2001, 44 people with intellectual disabilities were executed in the United States, when the practice was found to violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. USA Today reports, “since the 2002 ruling several hundred claims of mental retardation have been filed by prisoners on death row, representing about 7 percent of all cases, according to John Blume, a Cornell University law professor. Slightly more than 100 sentences have been reduced as a result, a 28 percent success rate.”

In the decision, Kennedy noted that this doesn't mean that Hall's sentence changes, but Hall's case will be sent to a lower court where his condition will be reassessed. “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,” Kennedy wrote.

While a shortage of lethal injection drugs has been creating difficulty for the 32 states that have capital punishment on the books, the court's decision in Hall v. Florida could have implications in Alabama, Virginia and Kentucky, which share Florida's rigid cutoff.

Whether the issue is drugs, or a lack of hard rules that determine if someone is mentally sound enough to be executed, it's getting more and more difficult for states to carry out capital punishment. But then, Kennedy seemed to argue that it shouldn't be easy.

“The death penalty is the gravest sentence our society may impose. Persons facing that most severe sanction must have a fair opportunity to show that the Constitution prohibits their execution,” he wrote. “Florida’s law contravenes our Nation’s commitment to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as the mark of a civilized world.”