Court throws out state’s challenge to judicial finding that inmate convicted of murder is ineligible for death penalty
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.
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Court throws out state’s challenge to judicial finding that inmate convicted of murder is ineligible for death penaltyThe US supreme court on Thursday threw out a challenge by the state of Alabama to a judicial findin...
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