© Florida Department of Corrections/APFlorida death-row inmate Freddie Lee Hall challenged the state's use of an IQ cutoff to determine mental disability. The Supreme Court sided with him on Tuesday, saying Florida's law doesn't take standard errors of measurement into account.
The court ruled 5 to 4 that state laws that draw a bright line on IQ-test results are unconstitutional. Under those laws, an inmate who scores above 70 on the test cannot be considered intellectually disabled and cannot present evidence that he or she should not be executed.
Florida, Virginia and Kentucky have such laws, and a handful of others have similar rules. It was the court's first consideration of state laws defining mental retardation in capital cases since its 2002 decision that executing the mentally retarded violated the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joined the court's liberals in Tuesday's ruling , and said laws imposing a strict IQ test run counter to a unanimous verdict in the medical community that such scores are imprecise.
"The death penalty is the gravest sentence our society may impose," Kennedy wrote. "Persons facing that most severe sanction must have a fair opportunity to show that the Constitution prohibits their execution. Florida's law contravenes our nation's commitment to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as the mark of a civilized world."
Kennedy was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the dissenters. He said the court was adopting a "uniform national rule that is both conceptually unsound and likely to result in confusion."
When the court ruled that the intellectually disabled could not be executed, Alito said, it left the decision of how to define mental retardation to the states.
Alito was joined by the rest of the court's conservatives: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
The case involved Freddie Lee Hall, 68, who has lived more than half his life on Florida's death row. He was sentenced to death for raping and killing Karol Hurst, 21 years old and pregnant, after he and a co-defendant kidnapped her as she left a grocery store in 1978.
The men killed a police officer who interrupted their plans to rob a convenience store later that day.
Lawyers for Hall have argued in decades of court procedures that he should be spared because of a brutal childhood and because he has been identified since he was a boy, and later by some judges, as mentally retarded.
The case is Hall v. Florida.
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