Texas Death Row Inmate's Intellectual Disability Claim Faces Skeptical Supreme Court
The Supreme Court appeared poised to reject Dexter Johnson's bid to use updated psychiatric guidelines to revive an Eighth Amendment challenge to his execution.
Texas Death Row Inmate Struggles to Win Supreme Court Support for Disability Claim
The Supreme Court appeared likely Wednesday to reject a Texas death row inmate's attempt to leverage updated medical guidelines in a renewed challenge to his death sentence, Courthouse News Service reports.
Dexter Johnson was convicted of murdering Maria Aparece in 2007. At that point, the Supreme Court had already ruled five years earlier in Atkins v. Virginia that executing a person with an intellectual disability is unconstitutional. Johnson, however, did not qualify for that protection under the diagnostic criteria used during his trial and initial appeals — his IQ scores of 79 and 88 were too high for a diagnosis of intellectual disability.
That changed in 2013, when the American Psychiatric Association released DSM-5, the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The updated guidelines shifted away from relying solely on IQ scores, incorporating other functional deficits — and under those new criteria, Johnson qualifies as intellectually disabled. During his trial, experts had testified that Johnson possessed the intellectual functioning of a 10-year-old, and his attorneys say his language deficits place him "well below the lowest one percentile" of the population.
A single habeas petition — with narrow exceptions
Federal law under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act generally limits individuals to one habeas corpus application. A second petition is permitted only if it rests on "a new rule of constitutional law made retroactive to cases on collateral review by the Supreme Court that was previously unavailable." The Fifth Circuit held that Johnson met that standard, clearing him to file a successive federal habeas application. The Supreme Court took up the case apparently to revisit that conclusion.
Conservative justices express deep skepticism
The court's conservative majority questioned whether Johnson's case would effectively eliminate finality in death penalty proceedings. Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the prospect of "eternal Atkins claims and zero finality," warning that constantly evolving medical standards around intellectual disability could generate endless successive petitions.
Justice Clarence Thomas pressed Johnson's attorneys on whether Atkins could ever stop being considered a "new rule," implying that treating each update to diagnostic criteria as a fresh legal foundation would render the finality requirement meaningless.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett drew a pointed analogy: "I mean when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, that was new. I don't think anybody would describe the telephone as new today." Her point — that novelty fades — suggested she viewed the DSM-5 revisions as building on, rather than transforming, an existing legal rule.
Liberal justices push back
The court's three Democratic-appointed justices took a different view. Justice Elena Kagan argued that Atkins itself anticipated that the medical definition of intellectual disability would evolve, since the ruling explicitly tied the constitutional standard to prevailing clinical criteria.
"It would be wrong to think of Atkins as a single rule," Kagan said, adding that a fundamental shift in diagnostic criteria effectively generates what she called an "Atkins II rule" — one that could qualify as new for defendants like Johnson. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson proposed a narrower framework: rather than asking whether a claim is new in general, the court should assess whether it is new to the specific individual bringing it.
Despite the support of all three liberal justices, Johnson appeared to fall well short of a majority. The five Republican-appointed justices showed little inclination to extend him a path forward, with their questions focused squarely on the risks of undermining finality in capital cases.
The outcome of the case will determine whether courts may treat updates to psychiatric diagnostic standards as the basis for a new constitutional claim under Atkins — a question with potential implications for other death row inmates whose intellectual disability determinations were made under older clinical criteria.
Source: Courthouse News Service