Constitutional Law Prof Blog – May 28, 2014
Professor Steve Schwinn weighs in on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling regarding the role of a convict’s IQ in death penalty sentences. “The ruling is just the latest blow to the death penalty,” he writes. “It means that states can’t use a rigid IQ cutoff to determine intellectual disability under Atkins; instead, they have to consider the SEM and other evidence of intellectual disability, consistent with the standard medical approach of measuring intellectual disability.”