The Supreme Court split 5-4 on Thursday to throw out Alabama's appeal in Hamm v. Smith, a death penalty case the justices had already agreed to hear, read briefs on, and argued in open court, only to walk away without answering the legal question at its center. Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined the court's three Democratic appointees to form the bare majority, leaving a lower court ruling that spares Alabama death row prisoner Joseph Smith from execution.
The four remaining conservative justices, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts, dissented. Their written opinions did not mince words about what the majority's silence means for capital punishment law going forward.
The practical result: Alabama cannot execute Smith for the 1997 murder of Durk Van Dam. The broader result may be worse. The court ducked the very question it had taken the case to resolve, how lower courts should weigh multiple IQ scores when a prisoner claims intellectual disability bars his execution. That question remains unanswered, and the confusion in lower courts that prompted Alabama's appeal in the first place persists.
The procedural move is known as a DIG, dismissing a case as "improvidently granted." It means the justices decided, after full briefing and oral argument, that they should not have taken the case at all. The unsigned majority offered a single line: "The writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted."
No explanation accompanied that line from the majority. It takes four justices to grant review. At least four wanted this case heard. Kavanaugh and Barrett evidently changed course somewhere between granting certiorari and issuing a final decision.
Neither Kavanaugh nor Barrett wrote separately to explain why. Readers who have followed Kavanaugh's recent public clashes with colleagues over the emergency docket know he is no stranger to breaking from expected alignments. But silence on a case this consequential invites more questions than it answers.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, offering the closest thing to a rationale for the dismissal. She argued that the evidentiary record and lower court rulings were not detailed enough for the justices to evaluate. She called the record "incomplete and potentially misleading."
Sotomayor wrote that the court "is not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores." She added "that the Eighth Amendment does not prescribe a single formula for weighing multiple IQ scores."
Justice Elena Kagan, the third Democratic appointee in the majority, did not join Sotomayor's concurrence and did not write separately. Her reasoning remains unknown.
Justice Alito authored the principal dissent, and his language carried an unmistakable edge. He accused the majority of deepening the very legal confusion that brought the case to the court's door. As the Washington Examiner reported, Alito wrote: "I respectfully dissent from the Court's decision to leave this important question unanswered."
His full warning went further:
"By instead remaining silent, the Court exacerbates the confusion that plagues our jurisprudence in this area. If this Court continues to shy away from opportunities to provide workable doctrine, we should not be surprised if petitions asking us to overrule Atkins, Hall, and Moore arrive at our doorsteps soon."
That is not a throwaway line. Alito, writing on behalf of four justices, is putting the court on notice: if the majority refuses to clarify the rules around intellectual disability and the death penalty, the conservative wing may push to overturn the foundational precedents entirely.
Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court's 2002 ruling, held that executing an intellectually disabled person violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. It has governed this area of law for more than two decades. But the decision left enormous discretion to lower courts on how to determine intellectual disability, and that discretion has produced wildly inconsistent outcomes.
Alabama's appeal was supposed to bring clarity. Instead, the majority walked away from the bench.
Justice Thomas joined Alito's dissent in full but also wrote his own solo opinion that went further than any of his colleagues. Where Alito warned that overruling Atkins might come, Thomas said it should come now.
"To avoid execution, Smith tried to convince courts that he is not intelligent enough to be executed. Today, the Court rewards Smith's efforts."
Thomas added that the Atkins framework "has bred only confusion and absurdity. Nothing in the text or history of the Constitution supports Atkins. It should be overruled."
That position, calling for the outright reversal of a two-decade-old Eighth Amendment precedent, stands alone for now. But Thomas's willingness to put it in writing, combined with Alito's warning that such petitions may soon arrive, signals a fault line on the court that could crack wide open in a future case. It is worth recalling that Chief Justice Roberts has publicly pushed back on claims the court is a political body. Decisions like Thursday's make that argument harder to sustain.
The immediate consequence is straightforward. The lower court ruling that found Joseph Smith ineligible for execution under Atkins stands. AP News reported that four conservative justices argued the appeals court had improperly analyzed Smith's intellectual disability claim and should have been ordered to reconsider it. The majority disagreed, or at least declined to say so.
The longer-term consequence is murkier and arguably more damaging. States seeking to carry out lawful death sentences now have no clearer guidance on how courts should handle cases involving multiple IQ scores. Lower courts remain free to apply different standards in different circuits. Prisoners and prosecutors alike are left guessing.
For Alabama specifically, the state brought its case all the way to the Supreme Court, invested the resources of full briefing and oral argument, and received nothing, not a ruling for, not a ruling against, not even a framework to apply next time. The state asked the justices to decide whether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores. The court punted.
The alignment itself raises questions. Newsmax noted that Kavanaugh joined the three liberal justices and Barrett to form the majority dismissing the case. On a court with six Republican appointees, two of them crossed to produce a result that left a death penalty opponent's lower court victory intact. Neither explained why.
Kavanaugh's recent trajectory on the court has drawn attention from both sides. He was praised by President Trump after a major tariff ruling, but his willingness to join liberal justices on procedural grounds in high-profile cases has become a pattern worth watching.
Barrett, too, has drawn scrutiny. She and Gorsuch were publicly named by Trump after a separate Supreme Court defeat. Her vote in Hamm v. Smith adds another data point for those tracking whether Republican-appointed justices are delivering the judicial philosophy their nominators expected.
The victim in this case, Durk Van Dam, murdered in 1997, has now waited nearly three decades for finality. Alabama's justice system prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced Joseph Smith. Lower courts intervened on intellectual disability grounds. The Supreme Court agreed to weigh in. And then five justices decided, after all of that, to say nothing at all.
The families of murder victims, the prosecutors who build these cases, and the states that carry out lawful sentences are left with a legal landscape that Alito himself described as plagued by confusion. The court had the case. It had the briefs. It had the argument. It chose silence.
Sotomayor called the record incomplete. The dissenters called the majority's retreat an abdication. What no one can call it is a resolution.
When the highest court in the land takes a case, hears it fully, and then walks away without a word of explanation from the deciding votes, it is not the law that suffers most. It is the people who trusted the system to finish what it started.
