Hamm v. Smith · ¶181
Today, the Court declines to offer guidance on analyzing multiple IQ scores despite receiving significant briefng on the issue. The Court's failure to resolve this issue will have regrettable consequences. Without clear rules for determining when multiple IQ scores are dispositive, nearly every Atkins case will devolve into an amorphous, individualized determination of whether the defendant meets an imprecisely defined notion of “significantly subaverage intellectual functioning” under which the role of IQ is not clearly articulated. See ante, at 294–298 (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (describing that approach as “holistic”). Such an approach will place our Atkins doctrine out of step with psychology, our death-penalty jurisprudence, and Atkins itself. In the field of psychology, IQ testing remains the standard practice for measuring intellectual functioning, and it is difficult to find a…Read in context ›
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