On July 27, Professor Laura Hoffman, Co-Director of the CSU Law Center for Health Law and Policy, published a blog post on “Bill of Health,” a publication of Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center. Professor Hoffman’s post, “Intellectual Disability, Geography, and a Life-or-Death Decision” discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling Hamm v. Smith, involving the issue of determining intellectual disability in death penalty cases.

Professor Hoffman notes that the Hamm case had been “watched by both criminal justice and disability rights advocates for its potential impact on convictions for individuals sentenced to death involving a determination of intellectual disability.” However, the Court ultimately dismissed the case as improvidently granted, thus providing no further clarification on the legal standard.

Professor Hoffman argues that “people with disabilities and their advocates have been fighting for — and very much deserve — a unified standard that still allows an individualized assessment of the individual, not just cherry-picking certain criteria like an IQ score to define intellectual disability.”