The Supreme Court has agreed to case that should help define how courts will decide whether a person is ineligible for execution due to being mentally disabled, according to the Associated Press.
The case in question comes from a Florida court's decision to uphold a death sentence given to a man who had scored slightly above the cutoff line for mental disability on an IQ test given by the state, the Associated Press reports.
In 1978 Freddie Lee Hall was convicted of murdering a 21-year-old pregnant woman and a deputy sheriff and was sentenced to death, according to USA Today.
Hall's case is very complicated in part because of a Supreme Court decision from 2002 that defined executing the intellectually disabled is considered "cruel and unusual" punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. The court's ruling left it to individual states to decide on a definition of "intellectually disabled," according to USA Today.
At the time of his sentencing Hall registered an IQ of 60 and two dissenting judges believed that he should not have been given the death penalty. The state of Florida considers the cut off line for intellectual disability to be an IQ of 70, a score that Hall has achieved in recent tests. Lawyers for Hall are arguing that it is impossible to have a set line to define intellectual disability, according to USA Today.
"Unfortunately, the human race has not yet developed a test for mental retardation that is like a blood pressure machine, hooked up to a defendant's arm with a gauge that reads R for retarded or N for not retarded," a court brief states. "The state of Florida cannot invent out of whole cloth a bright line cutoff for determining mental retardation."
The Supreme Court will hear the case later in the year. It is unknown if they will focus their ruling only on this specific case and the state of Florida or if they will issue a more broad ruling that takes away the ambiguity left behind in their 2002 decision, USA Today reports.