The US supreme court on Thursday threw out a challenge by the state of Alabama to a judicial finding that a death row inmate convicted of a 1997 murder is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible under the US constitution for the death penalty.
In this highly unusual move, and in a single-sentence, unsigned order, the court dismissed Alabama’s petition for review in Hamm v Smith without deciding it, effectively undoing its earlier decision to take up an appeal by state officials to the method used by a lower court to determine that Joseph Clifton Smith was intellectually disabled and therefore could not be executed.
