Supreme Court to hear dispute over death row inmate sentence

WASHINGTON (Gray DC) - The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case Wednesday centering on a dispute over a Texas death row inmate’s sentence.

It came before the justices after the legal team for the inmate, Dexter Johnson, challenged his death sentence, under a claim of intellectual disability. And it was a claim that not brought up during his initial trial.

“What’s happened here is that in the last 10 to 20 years, the medical community’s understanding of intellectual disability has changed,” said Ethan Nutter, a lawyer who filed an amicus brief in the case, on behalf of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Johnson was convicted of capital murder for the 2006 killing of 23-year-old Maria Aparece. He was scheduled to be executed in May 2019 but his sentence was stayed because of a federal court’s finding, after the challenge was raised.

“Under the current understanding, Mr. Johnson meets that definition of intellectual disability,” said Nutter. “And that’s important because the Supreme Court has said that it’s unconstitutional to execute someone who is intellectually disabled.”

Johnson’s litigators raised the intellectual disability claim just days before his scheduled execution because of the 2013 update to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). The update presented a change to the way clinicians view IQ.

“Only later did the DSM-5 displace the rigid IQ threshold, replacing it with a standard focused more on adaptive functioning deficits,” Johnson’s legal team wrote in a Supreme Court filing. “Under that framework, Mr. Johnson’s trial expert withdrew the premise that had previously foreclosed a disability diagnosis, and two additional experts concluded that Mr. Johnson is intellectually disabled.”

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Correctional Institutions later asked the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s finding for Johnson’s case, in February 2026.

In the department’s brief, it wrote that the lower court’s holding “erases the strict limits on claims based on new evidence.” It also wrote, “For the people of Texas in general and for the families of Johnson’s victims in particular, justice delayed is justice denied.”

In another amicus brief filed by Aparece’s father, Protasio Aparece, his legal team wrote, “Protasio has an interest in seeing justice carried out for his daughter, and in doing everything he can to ensure that no other family endures the decades of excessive delays in obtaining justice that he and his family have suffered.”

However, the question before the justices is not only about Johnson’s case, but also how strict federal courts should be when prisoners challenge their sentences.

Nutter said the court is deciding a specific procedural issue.

“The narrow issue in this case that the Supreme Court is actually deciding is whether the federal court can address this, what’s called a second or successive habeas petition,” Nutter said.

The court is expected to issue a decision in the case by June 2027.