WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday over how courts should decide borderline cases of whether convicted murderers are intellectually disabled and should be shielded from execution.

Justices heard two hours of arguments in an appeal from Alabama, which wants to put to death a man who lower federal courts have found is intellectually disabled.

Joseph Clifton Smith, 55, has been on death row roughly half his life after his conviction for beating a man to death in 1997.

The Supreme Court prohibited execution of intellectually disabled people in a landmark ruling in 2002. The justices, in cases in 2014 and 2017, held that states should consider other evidence of disability in borderline cases because of the margin of error in IQ tests.

The issue in Smith's case is what

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