Friday night certs: SCOTUS grants review in Alabama case on applying Atkins

The Supreme Court has been consistently issuing its full order lists at the start of weeks for all of 2025.  Indeed, the Supreme Court’s website in one place states, as I write this, that “the Court will release an order list at 9:30 a.m. on Monday, June 9.”  And yet the Supreme Court issued this order list late today.  And it is quite the order list for sentencing fans, with two of three Friday cert grants involving notable and long-simmering sentencing issues.

One of these cert grants came in Hamm v. Smith, 24-872, a long-running capital case concerning how Alabama (and the Eleventh Circuit) applied the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on the execution of persons who are intellectually disabled.  This case has been lurking around the Court since August 2023, and now the Justice have finally taken it up.  In so doing, the Court has already decided what it is going to decide:  “The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted limited to the following question: Whether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores in assessing an Atkins claim.”

Because the Supreme Court does not take up all that many capital cases or many Eighth Amendment cases or even many constitutional criminal cases these days, Hamm v. Smith is a notable case and could provide an interesting window into how some newer Justices will approach older Eighth Amendment jurisprudence.  In the end, though, this case is unlikely to be especially consequential given that there are not all that many capital cases that involve Atkins claims anymore.