The Supreme Court dismissed Alabama's appeal Thursday in the case of Joseph Clifton Smith, a man who confessed to a 1997 robbery-murder, allowing a lower court ruling to stand that bars his execution on Eighth Amendment grounds. The 5-4 decision spares Smith from the death penalty he received for killing Durk Van Dam, and it does so without the Court bothering to explain its reasoning.
Smith will now spend life behind bars. The victim's family gets no closure from the sentence a jury imposed. And states across the country get no workable standard for how to handle IQ-score disputes in capital cases.
The ruling turns on whether Smith qualifies as intellectually disabled, a designation that, under more than two decades of Supreme Court precedent, shields a convicted murderer from execution. Alabama argued forcefully that Smith does not meet that threshold. The Court's slim majority disagreed, or at least declined to intervene, and four justices made clear they believe the decision was a serious abdication of judicial responsibility.
Smith confessed to murdering Durk Van Dam during a robbery in 1997. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. The specific details of the killing beyond Smith's own confession are not part of the public record in this proceeding, but Alabama's brief to the Court was blunt in its framing.
ABC News reported that Alabama told the justices:
"Joseph Smith is not intellectually disabled, and the Eighth Amendment does not override the death sentence he earned for murdering Durk Van Dam."
Smith challenged his sentence by arguing he has had "substantially subaverage intellectual functioning" since childhood. Court documents show he consistently performed two grade levels below his placement in school. His school classified him as "Educable Mentally Retarded" in the seventh grade before he dropped out. He also alleges he suffered physical and verbal abuse as a child.
Over nearly 40 years, Smith took five separate IQ tests. He scored 75 in 1979, 74 in 1982, 72 in 1998, 78 in 2014, and 74 in 2017. People who score below 70 are generally considered to have an intellectual disability. None of Smith's five scores fell below that line.
But standardized IQ tests carry a recognized margin of error, roughly three points. Smith's lowest score of 72, recorded in 1998, could theoretically be as low as 69 when that margin is applied. Two lower federal courts seized on this and other evidence, ruling that a "holistic analysis" of Smith's scores, behavioral history, and school records proved he is intellectually disabled.
Alabama's position was straightforward. The state argued that intellectual disability can only be proven by an IQ score of 70 or less, established by a preponderance of the evidence. None of Smith's five test results met that bar. Alabama further contended that how to weigh multiple IQ scores should be left to state discretion, not dictated by federal courts second-guessing a state's criminal justice system.
The high court offered no formal explanation for dismissing the appeal. It simply let the lower court ruling stand. That silence is itself a problem, and the dissenters said so in terms that deserve attention.
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote a dissent that did not mince words:
"The court shies away from its obligation to provide workable rules for capital cases. In doing so, the court disserves its own death-penalty jurisprudence, states' criminal justice systems, lower courts, and victims of horrific murders."
That is a remarkable rebuke from four justices, including the Chief Justice, directed at their own institution. Alito's dissent frames the decision not as a narrow procedural matter but as a failure that ripples outward: to prosecutors, to state courts, to the families of murder victims who believed the justice system would follow through on the sentences it imposed.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, that acknowledged the Court's limitations but offered little comfort to anyone seeking clarity. Sotomayor stated:
"The court is not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores."
She added that if a conflict among states or lower courts emerges and "a case properly presents the issue, it may be appropriate for this court to weigh in with more specific guidance." In other words: not now, maybe later, and good luck to everyone in the meantime.
Sotomayor also referenced "the views of medical experts." Major American medical groups have urged a holistic assessment that considers social and practical skills alongside IQ scores, arguing that standardized test results alone should not be conclusive. That position favors defendants like Smith, and it effectively moves the goalposts beyond any single numerical threshold a state legislature might set.
The tension here is real. If an IQ score of 72 can be treated as 69 through a margin-of-error adjustment, and if courts must also weigh school records, childhood hardship, and adaptive behavior, then the bright-line rule the Supreme Court established more than two decades ago, no executing intellectually disabled people, becomes a subjective, case-by-case inquiry with no fixed boundaries. States are left guessing. Lower courts are left improvising. And prosecutors pursuing lawful death sentences have no reliable standard to meet.
Justice Thomas went further than Alito's dissent. He wrote separately to call for reinstating the death penalty for intellectually disabled individuals, a direct challenge to the Court's own precedent. Whether or not one agrees with Thomas's position, his willingness to raise it signals deep frustration with a legal framework that, in practice, allows convicted killers to litigate their way off death row through dueling expert testimony and statistical margins of error.
The Death Penalty Information Center estimates that as many as 20 percent of the roughly 2,100 people currently on death row in the United States may have some degree of intellectual disability. If the Smith decision signals that holistic assessments and margin-of-error adjustments will routinely override state determinations, the downstream consequences for capital punishment nationwide could be significant.
Alabama's criminal justice system imposed a sentence. A jury heard the evidence and chose death. Two lower federal courts overruled that judgment. And now the Supreme Court, by the narrowest possible margin, has declined to even explain why it let that stand. The state asked for clarity. It got a shrug.
This is not an isolated episode of institutional drift. Washington has shown a recurring pattern of ducking difficult accountability questions when political or ideological pressures make clear answers inconvenient.
Durk Van Dam is dead. He was killed during a robbery in 1997. Joseph Clifton Smith confessed to the crime. A court sentenced Smith to die. Nearly three decades later, that sentence has been effectively erased, not because new evidence of innocence emerged, not because the conviction was flawed, but because five justices decided the man who confessed to the killing might score two points lower on an IQ test than his actual result showed.
Smith's five IQ scores span from 72 to 78. Not one fell below the 70-point threshold. The margin-of-error argument that saved him applies a statistical abstraction to override a concrete legal judgment. If that standard holds, any defendant scoring in the low-to-mid 70s can make a plausible claim, and the death penalty becomes, for a meaningful slice of capital cases, functionally unenforceable.
The four dissenters understood this. Alito's warning about "victims of horrific murders" was not rhetoric. It was a description of who loses when the Court refuses to set clear rules and instead lets ambiguity do the work of abolition.
The Supreme Court had a chance to give states, lower courts, and prosecutors a workable framework. It chose silence instead. That silence speaks volumes, just not to the people who needed an answer most.
