High court weighs how IQ scores should play into death penalty

The Supreme Court grappled on Wednesday with how courts consider multiple intelligence quotient tests when evaluating if a person is sufficiently intellectually disabled to be disqualified from the death penalty , as Alabama seeks to reverse a lower court that blocked the execution of a convicted murderer.

The justices heard arguments in Hamm v. Smith over how courts should handle multiple IQ tests when evaluating if someone on death row should be spared from execution due to an intellectual disability. The high court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia found that the death penalty, if used against people with intellectual disabilities, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Robert Overing, the lawyer for Alabama , asked the high court to allow the e