Supreme Court Debates If Hammer-Murderer Is Too Stupid to Throw His IQ Tests

Dumb-ass killer scores slightly over 69 cutoff all five times.

As I pointed out two days ago, I.Q. testing gets little respect from liberal conventional wisdom, except when it can be used to help a murderer escape the death penalty. Back in the 2002 Atkins decision, the Supreme Court ruled that states must pick an IQ score from 65 to 75 and not assign the death penalty to anybody who scored below it.

Way back in 1998, Joseph Clinton Smith (a white man) was convicted in Alabama of beating a robbery victim to death with a hammer, carpenter Durk Van Dam.

Alabama went with the middle of the road IQ score of 70 as the minimum for the death penalty.

Smith has taken IQ tests five times, two before his conviction and three after. All five times he scored between 72 and 78, which would suggest he’s over the 70 cutoff in Alabama.

I.Q. expert Russell Warne writes in The American Spectator:

Because of the lengthy appeals process, administering multiple IQ tests to a prisoner in a capital trial is very common. The brief from Smith’s lawyers includes a table of dozens of cases in which multiple IQ scores were considered; these prisoners took as many as 10 IQ tests over the course of their lifetime.

Unfortunately, testing experts do not have a consensus about how to reconcile multiple IQ scores. One unique problem is that many low-IQ prisoners on death row have a peculiar pattern of IQ decline. Smith’s five scores all within a 6-point range are the exception. Most of the post-Atkins prisoners with multiple IQ scores show a steady decline — up to 40 points! — over the years.

This is a level of decline generally only seen in dementia patients or people with severe brain damage, and yet these prisoners, usually with no new medical conditions, show a precipitous drop in IQ. The most likely explanation is that they are being coached by their lawyers to fail the tests so that it is easier to argue that the prisoner has an intellectual disability that precludes execution. This obvious confounding factor complicates efforts to apply theoretical rules to the practical question of combining IQ scores in death row appeals.

Rather than a rule about combining IQ scores, an amicus brief from the American Psychological Association and other organizations urges the use of holistic clinical judgment in deciding whether a particular inmate has an intellectual disability. This sounds sensible, but in practice it usually results in dueling expert witnesses.

To the American Psychological Association, dueling expert witnesses are a feature not a bug, as long as psychologists get paid for their contradictory testimony.

While holistic clinical judgment allows for more nuance and the consideration of unique individual characteristics, in this context it has resulted in inconsistent decisions. That inconsistency is why IQ tests are the topic of Supreme Court deliberations again.

Another problem with prioritizing clinical judgment is that it increases the subjectivity of the legal process. IQ tests are not perfect (no psychological test is), and they should never be the sole basis for making an irreversible life decision about a person. But IQ scores are the most objective evidence available regarding a person’s mental competence. This is especially true when the IQ test was administered before a crime occurred — as happened twice for Smith (IQs of 75 and 74) — when there is little motivation to perform poorly on the test. The argument for clinical judgment to take precedence over objective test scores amounts to little more than saying, “Trust the experts.”

After his conviction, when you’d expect any hammer-murderer with a lick of sense to register IQ test results down around 27, Smith instead stubbornly ground out similar scores of 72, 74, and 78.

Way back in 2002, I interviewed famous psychometricians like Arthur Jensen on the Supreme Court’s decision in the Atkins case:

One intelligence expert worried that we will end up executing only those killers “too stupid to realize that they ought to flunk their IQ test.”

Well, in Joseph Clinton Smith, the Supreme Court appears to have run into that murder too stupidly honest to save his life by intentionally scoring badly on his last three IQ tests. The man’s got pride, dammit.

This appears to have driven the three liberal justices nuts. Even thought Smith is a white murderer, instinctively the liberals know they are on the side of the killer. But if the torture-murderer is too to dumb to figure out he needs to score badly on his last three IQ tests, what can even the Supreme Court do for him?