By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court threw out on Monday a judicial decision that had spared a man convicted of murder in Alabama from execution because he was found to be intellectually disabled.
The justices concluded that the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals needs to clarify its ruling that Joseph Clifton Smith’s death sentence for a 1997 murder must be set aside in light of the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision that executing an intellectually disabled person is cruel and unusual punishment barred by the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
Smith was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of a man named Durk Van Dam in Alabama’s Mobile County. Smith fatally beat the man with a hammer and saw in order to steal his boots, some tools and $140, according to evidence in the case. The victim’s body was found in his mud-bound Ford Ranger truck in an isolated, wooded area.
The Supreme Court’s 2002 precedent in a case called Atkins v. Virginia barred executing intellectually disabled people.