What happened
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Texas death row prisoner Victor Saldaño’s case Monday, leaving in place a state high-court refusal to send his intellectual-disability claim back for merits review despite Texas itself supporting a remand.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the denial of certiorari, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The dissent said every expert who evaluated Saldaño concluded he is intellectually disabled, and that both Saldaño and the state asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to let a trial court review the evidence and decide whether executing him would comport with the Eighth Amendment.
The dispute turns on Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision barring execution of intellectually disabled people. According to the dissent, Saldaño was convicted of capital murder in 1996, resentenced to death in 2004 after federal habeas relief, and did not raise an Atkins claim in earlier state habeas applications filed in 2007 and 2008.
The dissent said the issue resurfaced after Texas sought an execution date in 2021. Saldaño raised competency concerns based on serious mental health issues and submitted evidence of a WAIS-IV full-scale IQ score of 73; the state’s expert later administered another WAIS-IV test that produced a score of 74. The parties then paused competency proceedings to address whether Saldaño may be intellectually disabled under Atkins.
After further investigation, two experts for Saldaño and one for Texas concluded he met the Atkins standard, according to the dissent. In 2024, Saldaño filed a second subsequent habeas application, arguing that Texas law allowed him to proceed because no rational juror could impose the death penalty consistently with the Eighth Amendment if the intellectual-disability evidence were credited.
Justice Sotomayor wrote that Texas supported Saldaño’s application and asked the TCCA to remand for an evidentiary hearing and merits determination. But the state court rejected the application in a single paragraph, and both Saldaño and Texas told the Supreme Court that the evidence warranted litigation of the Atkins claim on the merits.
The dissent said that, assuming Saldaño’s factual allegations are true at this stage, he had made the required “threshold” Atkins showing. Justice Sotomayor wrote that the refusal to allow a merits determination could leave Saldaño to be executed without any court deciding whether he is intellectually disabled, and concluded that the court’s refusal to intervene created a significant risk that his Eighth Amendment rights would be violated.