The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear Alabama's appeal in the case of a death row inmate whose intellectual disability claim has kept his execution on hold for years, leaving in place a lower court ruling that blocked the state from carrying out the sentence.
The case centers on James Edward Barber, convicted and sentenced to death for the 2001 murder of Dorothy Epps in Harvest, Alabama. Barber bludgeoned Epps, his former girlfriend's mother, with a claw hammer during a burglary at her home. He was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to death by a Morgan County jury. The crime itself is not in dispute. What has divided courts for more than a decade is whether Barber's IQ scores place him in a category that the Constitution shields from execution.
The Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) that executing intellectually disabled individuals violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But the court left it to states to define the clinical standards and procedures for evaluating those claims. That gap has produced years of litigation in cases like Barber's, where IQ scores hover near the cutoff line.
Barber's IQ has been tested multiple times over the course of his legal proceedings. His scores have ranged from the low 70s to the mid 70s, depending on the test and the evaluator. Alabama law, like most states, generally treats a score of 70 or below as a threshold indicator of intellectual disability, though clinical diagnosis also requires evidence of deficits in adaptive functioning and onset before age 18.
The Supreme Court weighed in on borderline cases in Hall v. Florida (2014), ruling that states cannot use a strict IQ cutoff of 70 without accounting for the standard error of measurement, a statistical concept reflecting the inherent imprecision in IQ testing. Under Hall, a score of 71 or 75 does not automatically disqualify a defendant from raising an intellectual disability claim, because the "true" score could fall within the disability range once the margin of error is considered.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Alabama courts had not properly applied the Hall framework when they rejected Barber's intellectual disability claim. The appeals court found that the state courts relied too heavily on a rigid IQ number without giving adequate weight to the standard error of measurement or to evidence of Barber's adaptive behavior deficits.
The Associated Press reported that the Eleventh Circuit's decision effectively sent the case back for further proceedings, requiring Alabama courts to conduct a new evaluation of Barber's intellectual disability claim under the proper constitutional standard. Alabama asked the Supreme Court to intervene and reverse that ruling.
The state argued that the Eleventh Circuit overstepped by second-guessing the state court's factual findings on Barber's intellectual capacity. Alabama's position was that its courts had reasonably weighed the evidence and that federal courts should defer to those conclusions under the strict standards of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, known as AEDPA. That 1996 law limits federal courts from overturning state court rulings unless the state court's decision was "contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law."
The Supreme Court's decision to deny Alabama's petition came without a published opinion and without any noted dissents. The court did not explain its reasoning, which is standard practice when the justices decline to take a case. A denial of certiorari does not affirm the lower court's reasoning on the merits; it simply means fewer than four justices voted to hear the appeal.
Still, the practical effect is clear. The Eleventh Circuit's ruling stands, and Alabama must now go back and reassess Barber's intellectual disability claim under the framework the federal appeals court laid out. That process could take months or longer, depending on whether new evaluations are ordered and how the state courts handle the remand.
The case arrives during a period of heightened national attention on Alabama's capital punishment system. The state has faced intense scrutiny over its execution methods, including its use of nitrogen hypoxia, which Alabama became the first state to employ in January 2024 when it executed Kenneth Smith. That execution drew criticism from some medical and human rights groups, though Alabama officials defended the method as humane.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has been an outspoken advocate for carrying out death sentences and has pushed back against what he views as federal court interference in the state's criminal justice system. The Barber case fits a broader pattern in which Alabama has sought Supreme Court review of federal court rulings that delayed or blocked executions.
The state has executed more inmates per capita than nearly any other state in recent years. Alabama carried out multiple executions in 2023 and 2024, and officials have signaled they intend to continue at that pace. The Barber case, however, raises a constitutional question that even the most aggressive execution schedule cannot bypass: whether the inmate meets the clinical and legal definition of intellectual disability.
Dorothy Epps was 75 years old when Barber killed her. The crime was brutal by any measure. Barber broke into her home, attacked her with a claw hammer, and left her to die. He was linked to the crime through physical evidence and was convicted after a trial in which the facts of the killing were largely undisputed.
For the Epps family, the legal proceedings have now stretched more than two decades. Each round of appeals, each remand, each new evaluation extends the timeline further. Victims' rights advocates have long argued that the post-conviction process in capital cases imposes its own form of cruelty on surviving family members, who are forced to relive the crime each time the case resurfaces in court.
That tension sits at the heart of cases like this one. The Constitution forbids executing the intellectually disabled. It also promises justice to victims of violent crime. When those principles collide in a borderline case, the legal system grinds slowly, and the families on both sides bear the weight.
With the Supreme Court's refusal to intervene, the case returns to the lower courts. Alabama will need to conduct a new hearing on Barber's intellectual disability claim, applying the standard error of measurement as required by Hall v. Florida. If the state court finds that Barber is intellectually disabled, he cannot be executed, though he would remain in prison serving a life sentence. If the court finds he is not disabled, the state could move to set a new execution date, though further appeals would almost certainly follow.
Investigators and clinicians will need to determine whether Barber's adaptive functioning deficits, his history before age 18, and his IQ scores taken together meet the clinical threshold. That evaluation is not a simple number check. It requires expert testimony, review of school and medical records, and careful application of diagnostic criteria from the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed how quickly the state courts will schedule the new proceedings. Alabama's attorney general's office has not issued a public statement on the Supreme Court's denial in this case.
The Atkins rule is now more than two decades old. No serious legal challenge to its core holding is pending. The debate has shifted entirely to the margins: which evaluation methods states must use, how much weight to give borderline scores, and how much deference federal courts owe to state court findings on clinical questions.
For conservatives who support the death penalty, cases like Barber's pose a frustrating but unavoidable reality. The Constitution draws a line. The question is where that line falls when the numbers are close and the experts disagree. Alabama wanted the Supreme Court to push that line in the state's favor. The court, at least for now, said no.
When the law protects even the worst offenders from a punishment the Constitution forbids, that is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working exactly as designed. The harder question is whether the process built around that protection has become so slow and so tangled that justice itself gets lost in the machinery.
