The Supreme Court sounds surprisingly open to a case against a death sentence
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Supreme Court Hears Alabama Death Row IQ Threshold Case
Should IQ tests alone determine intellectual disability, or must courts consider adaptive functioning deficits?
Above: The Contemplation of Justice statue outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 8, 2025. Image credit: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty Images
The Spin
Right narrative
Smith brutally murdered a man with a hammer and now wants to escape justice by claiming low IQ scores excuse his savage crime. He scored between 72 and 78 on five separate tests, consistently above Alabama's threshold. Liberal activists are demanding holistic clinical judgment that amounts to dueling expert witnesses helping killers game the system.
Left narrative
Alabama wants to execute someone who was placed in special education as a child and who learns at a level well below his age. Multiple IQ scores falling within the margin of error for intellectual disability, combined with documented adaptive functioning deficits, clearly meet the medical standards that SCOTUS has repeatedly affirmed cannot be reduced to a single number.
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© 2025 Improve the News Foundation.
All rights reserved.
Version 6.18.0