Tim Shoop, Warden v. Danny Hill

In Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), the Court held that the Eighth Amendment bars the execution of the intellectually disabled, but left it to the States to decide who qualifies for this limitation. Id. at 317. After Atkins, the Ohio Supreme Court adopted a common clinical definition to identify those with intellectual disabilities. Its definition included three elements: “(1) significantly subaverage intellectual functioning, (2) significant limitations in two or more adaptive skills, such as communication, self-care, and self-direction, and (3) onset before the age of 18.” State v. Lott, 779 N.E.2d 1011, 1014 (Ohio 2002). In this case, relying on the clinical judgments of two experts, an Ohio trial court rejected Respondent Danny Hill’s Atkins claim because he did not meet the second Lott element (adaptive-skills deficits). In 2008, an Ohio appellate court affirmed. A decade later, the Sixth Circuit held that the state appellate court unreasonably applied Atkins within the meaning of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. To reach this result, the circuit court repeatedly invoked Moore v. Texas, 137 S. Ct. 1039 (2017)—a case that was decided years after the Ohio appellate decision and that criticized a state court for allowing lay perceptions to trump clinical judgments. The question presented is: Did the Sixth Circuit properly use the Moore decision from 2017 to find that an Ohio court unreasonably applied Atkins in 2008, even though the Ohio court relied on the clinical judgments of experts to find that Hill was not intellectually disabled?