The Supreme Court sounds surprisingly open to a case against a death sentence |
From the moment the Republican Party gained a 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, in late 2020, the Court has often acted as if it is going down a checklist — identifying landmark precedents that are out of favor with the GOP, and overruling those decisions in party-line votes.
Among other things, the Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, abolished affirmative action at nearly all universities, and expanded religious conservatives’ ability to violate state and federal laws that they disagree with on religious grounds. Each of these decisions, and more, were clean breaks with previous Supreme Court decisions handed down by a more liberal panel of justices.
One uncertain question going into Wednesday morning’s oral argument in Hamm v. Smith, a death penalty case, is whether the Republican justices’ checklist includes past decisions limiting the government’s ability to impose cruel and unusual punishments on criminal offenders. Based on Wednesday’s oral argument, however, it now appears that this Court’s plan for the future of criminal punishment is much more modest than their ambitions on topics such as race or abortion.
It is unclear whether a majority of the Court will vote to save Joseph Clifton Smith — who is on death row in Alabama and who argues it is unconstitutional to execute him because of an intellectual disability — from being killed by the state. But several key justices appeared sufficiently skeptical of Alabama’s arguments in this case that it is, at least, possible that Smith could prevail.
Significantly, all of the justices appeared to take the Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia (2002), which held that people with intellectual........