The Supreme Court wrestled on Dec. 10 over how judges should weigh IQ scores when determining whether a convict was wrongly sentenced to death.
The case, Hamm v. Smith, centered on an Alabama man convicted of murder in the 1990s, but the legal questions involved stem from a 2002 decision by the high court known as Atkins v. Virginia.
In that case, a majority held that the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishment prevented death sentences for intellectually disabled individuals.
Questions remained, however, as to how individual states would determine disability and courts would in turn apply the Eighth Amendment to state determinations….