Whether Hall v. Florida announced a new rule of constitutional law or was simply an application of Atkins v. Virginia

QUESTIONS PRESENTED 1. In Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), this Court held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments preclude the execution of defendants with intellectual disability but left to the states the task of developing a mechanism to determine who is intellectually disabled. In response, the Florida Supreme Court in Cherry v. State, 959 So. 2d 702 (Fla. 2007), made Florida an outlier in death penalty jurisprudence by imposing an unscientific cutoff requiring a capital defendant to present an IQ of 70 or below to qualify as intellectually disabled. On May 27, 2014, this Court in Hall v. Florida, 572 U.S. 701 (2014), held the Cherry standard unconstitutional, finding that the Florida Supreme Court had interpreted its statute in violation of the Eighth Amendment “[bly failing to take into account the standard error of measurement [inherent in IQ testing], [so that] Florida’s law not only contradicts the test’s own design but also bars an essential part of a sentencing court’s inquiry into adaptive functioning.” 572 U.S. at 724. In Walls v. Florida, 213 So. 3d 340 (Fla. 2016), the Florida Supreme Court held that Ha// applied retroactively in collateral proceedings. However, following a change in the court, a reconstituted Florida Supreme Court sua sponte receded from Walls and decided that Hal/ announced a new non-watershed rule for Eighth Amendment purposes and thus was not retroactive. Phillips v. State, 299 So. 3d 1013 (Fla. 2020). This case presents the question whether HaJ/s holding that defendants with intellectual disability include those whose IQ scores are within the standard error of measurement, announced a new rule of constitutional law within the meaning of Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989) (denying retroactive application to most new rules of constitutional law), as the court below and the Eleventh Circuit have held, or was instead simply an application of the rule of Atkins to particular facts, as Petitioner contends and all other Circuit decisions conclude. 2. Tn addition, this case presents the question whether the Florida Supreme Court violated Petitioner’s Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights by applying Florida’s law-of-the-case doctrine arbitrarily so as to deny him the benefit of Hal/in disregard of the rule that only a “firmly established and regularly followed state practice ... can prevent implementation of federal constitutional rights.” James v. Kentucky, 466 U.S. 341, 348-349 (1984). 1