A divided Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed Alabama’s bid to be allowed to execute a convicted murder who was found by lower courts to be intellectually disabled.
The court’s action leaves in place lower court rulings in favor of Joseph Clifton Smith, 55, who has been on death row roughly half his life after his conviction for beating a man to death in 1997.
The Supreme Court prohibited execution of intellectually disabled people in a landmark ruling in 2002. The justices, in cases in 2014 and 2017, held that states should consider other evidence of disability in borderline cases because of the margin of error in IQ tests.
The issue in Smith’s case is what happens when a person has multiple IQ scores that are slightly above 70, which has been widely accepted as a marker of intellectual disability. Smith’s five IQ tests produced scores ranging from 72 to 78. Smith had been placed in learning-disabled classes and dropped out of school after seventh grade, his lawyers said. At the time of the crime, he performed math at a kindergarten level, spelled at a third-grade level and read at a fourth-grade level.
The justices had taken up the case to consider how courts should handle such borderline cases of intellectual disability. Arguments took place in December.
Rather than issue a decision, though, the high court dismissed the appeal, an unusuaI action that leaves the last lower-court ruling in place.
You have to really like murdering people to take a case like this all the way to the Supreme Court. This guy isn’t a serial killer or mass murderer or terrorist. He’s not a serial rapist or torturing psychopath. If they believed he was likely to repeat his crimes, fine, keep him behind bars for life. They tried to follow their harsh laws, got slapped down, and then kept trying again and again. Why? What are they accomplishing by killing him vs keeping him locked up?
Even regardless of the debate of whether capital punishment is moral and good for a healthy society, just because you are legally ALLOWED to kill someone doesn’t mean you HAVE to.
Prosecutors and state governments love executing people because they keep claiming it “deters crime”. It also looks fantastic on your resume to a certain stripe of voters when you can yell “I helped get rid of XX amount of DANGEROUS CRIMINALS”.
You also want to kill anyone who you’ve already decided to kill, because otherwise they tend to have a habit of being exonerated. It’s awful embarrassing to have to say “yes we framed a dozen murders on this guy who didn’t do anything but steal a bike” or whatever.
They tried to follow their harsh laws, got slapped down, and then kept trying again and again. Why? What are they accomplishing by killing him vs keeping him locked up?
So some politicians can say they’re “tough on crime” when they run for re-election.
Seriously.
I’m tired of the games we’re playing here in the US, the facts, the reality, is that we have a party in this country who doesn’t give a shit about people at all and they’re not even good at hiding it but no one in their party wants to admit they were wrong about things. There really isn’t anything more to it. It’s a fact, cold hard fact. Look at the states where the Republicans have majority control and then look at the states where the Democrats historically have had control and then tell me which are objectively doing better. It’s not hard at all to tell. In almost every single metric the Democrat states will be better. There is no boogeyman about it either, it’s greedy folks at the top who have planned and pitted us against each other from the start. We could all be doing so much better without them and their constant lying, gaslighting, rewriting history, wanting to relive history. Enough with it. We need to move on from last century and leave the dinosaurs in the dirt. Sorry for the semi unrelated rant.
I think this rant is very relevant and I feel inclined to follow suit!
Unfortunately the Republican Party does an exceptional job at pandering to the self aggrandizing rhetoric that their base holds so dear. The rhetoric that gives them the very clearly defined notion to believe they are superior to the left without actually doing ANYTHING to support any superiority. Humans have a hard time with self esteem and it appears a large group of Americans (MAGA) need an enemy (citizens of color, immigrants, the left) to feel any sort of self-worth all while their “leaders” lead in the most reprehensible way possible; in their own self-interest, from the rear, without regard for the people they are “leading”.
I’ve said it in other rants but from my perspective how could the western world be surprised that we’ve reached a time when almost every capitalistic country is at a point where the most savage, morally reprehensible, and self-interested people are leading the rest of us when the entire system rewards people who succeed the best at accumulating money (power) by any means necessary? Like these dudes both sides of the aisle may be interesting to talk to, in a clinical setting, but explain to me how a snake oil salesman like Trump can be reported as succeeding in life by any other metric other than accumulating capital?
Becoming a politician has become such an easy way to make money too, it’s basically the same thing as an influencer, and if you are good at social media you will probably make a good politician because that’s all it takes really, because people want to believe what you say. So it’s not a big wonder that we have such reprehensible assholes in government when anyone can just lie through their teeth to get on the gravy train like that dipshit Fetterman.
Precedence has already been set. They have to be made President of the United States.
I sense a smidgin of smartassativity in your statement! Correct me if I’m wrong.
Wrong. Far more than a smidgin. Far far more.
Keep up the good fight!
