The Supreme Court on May 21 rejected an attempt by the state of Alabama to execute a convicted murderer whose low IQ may render him intellectually disabled and thus protected from capital punishment by the U.S. Constitution.
The court in an unsigned order dismissed an appeal from Alabama after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Joseph Clifton Smith, with the appeals court holding that Smithʼs low-70s IQ put him close enough to the threshold of an intellectually disability to render his death sentence unconstitutional.
The court heard oral arguments in the case in December 2025. The case had followed a twisting path through the federal court system; the 11th Circuit first ruled in Smithʼs favor in 2023, after which the Supreme Court in 2024 vacated that decision and ordered the appeals court to consider it again.
A second review by the lower court, with another favorable ruling for Smith, again brought the case before the Supreme Court last year; the high courtʼs May 21 ruling brought the case to an end.
The latest ruling represents a potential precedent in how the Supreme Court considers certain cases of capital punishment. The court ruled in the 2002 case Atkins v. Virginia that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.”
The justices did not define “intellectual disability” in that case, though it cited expert opinion that “an IQ between 70 and 75 or lower” is “typically considered the cutoff” in some definitions.
Theresa Farnan, philosopher on the Ethics and Public Policy Committee of the National Catholic Partnership on Disability, told EWTN News in April that Smithʼs death sentence was “clearly a borderline case.” Smith was convicted in the brutal 1997 slaying of Durk Van Dam.
“It’s obvious to me he could not grasp the gravity of his crimes,“ Farnan said of Smith. ”In cases like these, the burden on us as a society is even more pronounced to be radically pro-life.”
The Catholic Church in recent decades has come out increasingly against the death penalty, with multiple popes arguing that modern penal systems have rendered capital punishment inadmissible in many if not most cases.
Pope Leo XIV in particular has spoken out several times against the death penalty in just the first year of his pontificate, arguing that “human life is to be respected” and that support for capital punishment is incompatible with a pro-life philosophy.