USA - Florida. Florida Supreme Court Rules Intellectual Disability Decision Applies Retroactively for Frank Wall

Florida Supreme Court Rules Intellectual Disability Decision Applies Retroactively. The case is Walls v. State. The Court has ruled 5-2 to order a new hearing for Frank Walls, 49, White. Walls was sentenced to death on August 24, 1988 (and resentenced to death on July 29, 1992) after being convicted of the July 1987 murders of a couple (Edward Alger and Ann Peterson) during a burglary, and confessing to 3 other killings. The majority agreed that Walls was entitled to having a court review his claim that his intellectual disability prevented him from receiving a fair trial. Walls has been assessed by doctors as functioning at the level of a 12-year-old and suffering from brain damage, brain dysfunction and major psychiatric disorders. The sentence means that death-row prisoners who had unsuccessfully argued that they are ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability must be provided a second chance to prove their claims. Today the Court decided that Florida must retroactively apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Hall v. Florida, which declared Florida’s procedures for determining intellectual disability to be unconstitutional. Prisoners whose intellectual disability claims had been denied under the standard rejected in Hall will now be given new opportunities to present their claims. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Florida’s outlier practice categorically barring a prisoner from presenting evidence supporting his intellectual disability claim if his IQ score was above 70 violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Writing for the Court in Hall, Justice Kennedy explained this strict IQ cut-off requirement “disregards established medical practice” and “contravenes our Nation’s commitment to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as the mark of a civilized world.” The Hall Court held that “intellectual disability is a condition, not a number”; and therefore the determination of intellectual disability must not only consider a standard error of measure regarding IQ scores, but also consider adaptive functioning, which requires a “conjunctive and interrelated assessment.” The Florida Supreme Court recognized that “the rejection of the strict IQ score cutoff increases the number of potential cases in which the State cannot impose the death penalty, while requiring a more holistic review means more defendants may be eligible for relief.” The decision could affect thirty prisoners on Florida’s death row.