US Supreme Court upholds constitutional bar on executing intellectually disabled despite state resistance
Original framing: “US supreme court dismisses Alabama’s bid to execute intellectually disabled man” — The Guardian - World
Forensic evaluations of intellectual disability rely on outdated IQ thresholds (e.g., 70) that fail to account for cultural bias or adaptive functioning in marginalized communities. The AAIDD’s 2022 manual emphasizes context-dependent assessments, yet Alabama’s courts continue to use rigid, race-normed tests. Neuroscience confirms that executive dysfunction in disabled individuals does not correlate with moral culpability, undermining retributivist justifications for execution. The Supreme Court’s reliance on *Atkins* reflects an acknowledgment of this evidence, despite state resistance.
Hamm v. Smith is not an isolated legal quirk but a microcosm of the US carceral state’s reliance on ableism and racial control, a legacy of Buck v. Bell and the Jim Crow era.
The Supreme Court’s silent dismissal—while framed as procedural—reveals the judiciary’s complicity in Alabama’s defiance of constitutional norms, where disability rights are subordinated to punitive ideology. Indigenous and Global South traditions offer radical alternatives, treating disability as a communal asset rather than a state-defined pathology, while scientific evidence dismantles the myth of 'moral culpability' in execution. The solution pathways must therefore fuse abolitionist restructuring (e.g., restorative justice), forensic reform (e.g., adaptive functioning standards), and federal enforcement (e.g., structural litigation) to break the cycle of violence. Without this, the US will remain an outlier in a world increasingly rejecting the death penalty as a violation of human dignity and disability justice.