The Supreme Court issued an unsigned opinion Monday in Shoop v. Hill, an Ohio death penalty case, vacating a Sixth Circuit decision that Danny Hill should not be subject to the death penalty because of an intellectual disability.

In 1985 Hill was convicted of the rape and murder of 12-year old Raymond Fife and sentenced to death. However, following a 2002 Supreme Court decision in Atkins v. Virginia in which the court held that the Eighth Amendment banned the execution of individuals with intellectual disabilities, Hill appealed to state court arguing that he was intellectually disabled.

In 2005 the Ohio state court rejected this claim, holding that the standard outlined by the Ohio Supreme Court after Atkins was not met, and upheld his death sentence.

In 2010 the Sixth Circuit reversed the Ohio court’s holding and granted Hill habeas relief under 28 USC § 2254(d)(1), alleging two deficiencies in the judgement. First, it claimed that the Ohio court “overemphasized Hill’s adaptive strengths.” Second, it alleged that they “relied too heavily on adaptive strengths that Hill exhibited in the controlled environment of his deathrow prison cell.”

The Supreme Court described the rule for granting of habeas relief:

The federal habeas statute, as amended by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), imposes important limitations on the power of federal courts to overturn the judgments of state courts in criminal cases. The statute respects the authority and ability of state courts and their dedication to the protection of constitutional rights. Thus, under the statutory provision at issue here, 28 U. S. C. §2254(d)(1), habeas relief may be granted only if the state court’s adjudication “resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of,” Supreme Court precedent that was “clearly established” at the time of the adjudication.

The Supreme Court concluded that the Sixth Circuit unreasonably applied a 2017 case in its analysis, Moore v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court rejected a Texas court’s standard for determining whether an inmate was intellectually disabled. The Sixth Circuit’s opinion mirrored Moore in its reference to “overemphasized adaptive strengths.” The Supreme Court noted, “no reader of the decision of the [6th Circuit] can escape the conclusion that it is heavily based on Moore, which came years after the decisions of the Ohio courts”

Therefore, the Sixth Circuit should not have based its decision on Moore because it was decided many years after the state court’s ruling on Hill, and accordingly was not applicable at the time of Hill’s adjudication.

The Supreme Court explained that “[o]n remand, the [Sixth Circuit] should determine whether its conclusions can be sustained based strictly on legal rules that were clearly established in the decisions of this Court at the relevant time.”