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Supreme Court Rejects Florida’s Death-Penalty IQ Cutoff

Supreme Court Rejects Florida’s Death-Penalty IQ Cutoff

By Michael Doyle, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — A closely divided Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Florida’s strict IQ cutoff for determining a convicted criminal’s eligibility for the death penalty.

In a 5-4 ruling that affects other states as well, the court concluded that Florida’s rigid IQ threshold of 70 “disregards established medical practice” and creates the “unacceptable risk” that an inmate with intellectual disabilities might be executed, in violation of the Constitution.

“Our society does not consider this strict cutoff as proper or humane,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote.

Instead, Kennedy and the court’s four liberal justices concluded, Florida must consider IQ testing’s standard error of measurement, as well as other factors, in evaluating intellectual disability. This is already the practice in most of the nation’s other death-penalty states.

“By failing to take into account the (standard error of measurement) and setting a strict cutoff at 70, Florida goes against the unanimous professional consensus,” Kennedy wrote. “The flaws in Florida’s law are the result of the inherent error in IQ tests themselves.”

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the dissenters, noted that nine other states besides Florida effectively impose strict IQ cutoffs of 70 when determining eligibility for the death penalty. These other states also might face new pressure to change their practices.

“It is quite wrong for the court to proclaim that ‘the vast majority of states’ have rejected Florida’s approach,” Alito wrote. “The states have adopted a multitude of approaches to a very difficult question.”

The state tally is important to justices on all sides, because it can measure what the Supreme Court calls the “evolving standards of decency” concerning criminal penalties and punishments. Citing these evolving standards, for instance, the high court in 2005 banned the death penalty for those who commit crimes under the age of 18.

Kennedy wrote the 2005 opinion, as well.

Freddie Lee Hall, the 68-year-old convicted murderer who’s at the heart of the case decided Tuesday, has been on the state’s death row since 1978. He and an accomplice were convicted of murdering a 21-year-old pregnant woman and a Hernando County deputy sheriff.

The 16th of 17 children, Hall was “tortured by his mother and abused by his neighbors,” according to a 1993 dissenting opinion in the Florida Supreme Court. Hall was “functionally illiterate and has the short-term memory of a first-grader,” the dissenting opinion observed.

In nine separate IQ tests conducted throughout the years, Hall’s scores ranged from 60 to 80. Before one crucial hearing, he scored a 71.

The Supreme Court has previously decided, in the 2002 case Atkins v. Virginia, that executing those variously called mentally retarded or intellectually disabled violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The court left the definition up to individual states.

“No legitimate penological purpose is served by executing a person with intellectual disability,” Kennedy wrote in the decision issued Tuesday. “To impose the harshest of punishments on an intellectually disabled person violates his or her inherent dignity as a human being.”

Florida imposes a three-part test, which under a state court ruling effectively starts with a rigid requirement that the inmate score 70 or below on the IQ test. If the inmate scores below the cutoff number, the state also will assess for “deficits in adaptive behavior” and an onset before age 18.

Medical professionals, Kennedy stressed Tuesday, consider an IQ test score to represent a range rather a fixed point. Test scores may fluctuate from day to day, depending on the testing environment, the test-taker’s health, previous practice or other reasons.

The term “standard error of measurement” reflects the range that a single test score may represent. A score of 71, for instance, is generally considered to reflect a range of 66 to 76.

“An IQ score is an approximation, not a final and infallible assessment of intellectual functioning,” Kennedy wrote.

Seth Waxman, formerly the Obama administration’s solicitor general, argued on Hall’s behalf before the high court. Another one of Hall’s attorneys, Tampa-based Eric Pinkard, praised the ruling Tuesday, saying that “the court has recognized that intellectual disability is a condition, not a number, and that consequently Florida cannot ignore the standard error of measurement inherent in all IQ tests.”

Taking account of the standard error of measurement means that an IQ score of 71 to 75 would fall within the range of intellectual disability, which used to be called mental retardation.

Under the new ruling, Pinkard noted, these defendants would be able to present additional evidence of intellectual disability, including testimony concerning their difficulties in adapting.

Jenn Meale, a spokeswoman for Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, said Tuesday afternoon that Bondi’s office was reviewing the court’s ruling.

Photo: Matt H. Wade via Wikimedia Commons

High Court Limits Death Penalty In Cases Of Intellectual Disability

High Court Limits Death Penalty In Cases Of Intellectual Disability

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court put a new and slightly expanded limit on the death penalty Tuesday, ruling that defendants whose IQ scores are near 70 should be spared because of their “intellectual disability.”

In a 5-4 decision, the court rejected the “rigid rule” set by Florida and several other states that deny leniency to a convicted murderer who scores at least 70 on an IQ test.

“Intellectual disability is a condition, not a number,” said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. “Courts must recognize, as does the medical community, that the IQ test is imprecise. … In using these scores to assess a defendant’s eligibility for the death penalty, a state must afford these test scores that same studied skepticism that those who design and use the tests do, and understand that an IQ test score represents a range rather than a fixed number.”

The high court abolished the death penalty in 2002 for those who are “mentally retarded,” but at the time, it did not set a precise rule for defining who qualified. Its opinion cited an IQ score of 70 as an understood cut-off point so that those who scored below would be spared.

Since then, several states, including Florida, Virginia, Alabama and Kentucky, have decided to disqualify any inmate who had at least one IQ score of 70 or above. Beyond those, Arizona, Delaware, Kansas, North Carolina and Washington have also referred to a 70 score as a “bright-line cutoff,” Kennedy said.

In Tuesday’s opinion, Kennedy and the court said state officials should not “view a single factor as dispositive” and should consider the inmate’s “adaptive functioning” in society.

The ruling set aside the death penalty handed down against Freddie Lee Hall for two murders in Florida in 1978. He had been described as “psychotic, mentally retarded and brain damaged” at the time of his conviction, but he scored 71 on a single IQ test.

Kennedy’s opinion was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

OZinOH via Flickr

Supreme Court Scrutinizes Florida’s Death Penalty Law

Supreme Court Scrutinizes Florida’s Death Penalty Law

By Michael Doyle, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Florida’s death penalty came under fire from a key Supreme Court justice Monday, as a divided court confronted the role of low IQ scores in exempting convicted murderers from execution.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court’s frequent swing vote, joined more liberal justices in questioning Florida’s rigid IQ score threshold for determining intellectual disability. Kennedy’s positioning hinted at the possibility that the court, probably on a close vote, might strike down the strict IQ rule used by Florida, Idaho, Kentucky and several other states with the death penalty.

More broadly, Kennedy raised doubts about Florida’s administration of the death penalty and the long delays that have ensued. His implicit criticism went beyond Monday’s case, and hinted at other capital punishment debates to come.

“The last 10 people Florida has executed have spent an average of 24.9 years on death row,” Kennedy reminded Florida Solicitor General Allen Winsor. “Do you think that is consistent with the purposes of the death penalty, and is it consistent with sound administration of the justice system?”

Pressed several times, Winsor noted that Florida lawmakers had addressed “a number of issues” Kennedy raised with passage of legislation last year. Many prison inmates have since challenged the state’s Timely Justice Act, which is now before the Florida Supreme Court.

Freddie Lee Hall, the 68-year-old convicted murderer whose case was before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, has been on the state’s death row since 1978. He and an accomplice were convicted of murdering a 21-year-old pregnant woman and a Hernando County deputy sheriff.

“He is the one who seized the young woman, who pushed her into a car, who drove the car with his accomplice following in another car and who killed her, and … killed a policeman, too, later,” Justice Antonin Scalia recounted, suggesting that Hall’s actions showed some level of mental competence.

Hall didn’t raise the mental retardation issue for the first 10 years of his imprisonment. After he did, Kennedy noted pointedly, five years passed before the state conducted the hearing designed to assess his intellectual capacity.

The Supreme Court has previously decided, in a 2002 case called Atkins v. Virginia, that the execution of those variously called mentally retarded or intellectually disabled violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The court left the definition up to individual states.

Florida imposes a three-part test, which starts with a rigid requirement that the inmate score 70 or below on the IQ test. If the inmate scores below the cutoff number, the state also will assess for “deficits in adaptive behavior” and an onset before the age of 18.

“Florida has an interest in ensuring that the people who evade execution because of mental retardation are, in fact, mentally retarded,” Winsor said.

Hall and his allies counter that Florida errs by not taking into account the standard 5-point margin of error, which means someone who scores a 75 might actually have a testable IQ of 70.

“If a state conditions the opportunity to demonstrate mental retardation on obtained IQ test scores, it cannot ignore the measurement error that is inherent in those scores, that is a statistical feature of the test instrument itself,” Hall’s attorney, former Solicitor General Seth Waxman, told the court.

Photo: OZinOH via Flickr