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Story summary
- Court dismissed Hamm v. Smith in a 5-4 vote, leaving the inmate on death row with no guidance on intellectual disability.
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the Eighth Amendment does not require an IQ formula.
- Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, urging overturn of the 2002 Atkins decision.
- Nearly three-quarters of federal death sentences involve people of color, a fact Dom Kelly called a form of racial lynching.
