SCOTUS refuses to hear Texas man's intellectual disability defense in death penalty case

After prosecuting Saldaño's murder case, Texas officials joined the man's bid to remand the case to a trial court to fully weigh his intellectual disability argument.

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a Texas man’s bid to stave off his looming execution related to a murder conviction based on his argument that he is intellectually disabled.

Victor Saldaño was previously successful in challenging a 1994 murder conviction and death sentence, but when retried in 2004 he again faced the death penalty, which he argues was wrong due to his trial attorney’s failure to present mental health or intellectual disability evidence.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, dissented from the court’s decision to deny certiorari in Saldaño’s case, noting that every expert who had evaluated him had concluded the man was intellectually disabled.

“Under Atkins v. Virginia, the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids the execution of intellectually disabled individuals,” Sotomayor wrote. “Here, every expert to have evaluated petitioner Victor Saldaño has concluded that he is intellectually disabled.”

The Barack Obama appointee noted both Saldaño and Texas prosecutors had asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to remand for a trial court to assess whether Saldaño could be executed at all, a “modest step” that the appeals court refused. Sotomayor said she would have granted cert and vacated the appeals court’s decision to make sure a trial court could fully weigh Saldaño’s challenge.

Texas sought an execution date for Saldaño in 2021, after which he filed a motion arguing he was incompetent to be executed due to serious mental health issues, including schizophrenia. He submitted evidence that he scored a 73 on an IQ test, then later scored 74 on a state-administered test. The state agreed to pause competency proceedings and address his intellectual disability claims.

Three experts concluded Saldaño met the standard for the disability under Atkins, noting the additional evidence of subaverage intellectual functioning and severe deficits in adaptive functioning.

“For instance, from childhood, Saldaño was perceived as ‘slow,’ and he had to repeat sixth grade,” Sotomayor said, citing Saldaño’s petition. “He once ‘spent two days without food, a bathroom or anything else’ inexplicably waiting outside his uncle’s house even though other family members lived nearby. He was also twice struck by cars because he could not grasp his family’s explanations of how to avoid cars in the street.”

In 2024, Saldaño filed a subsequent habeas application to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals — which is normally barred except for certain exceptions — arguing that he could clearly establish no reasonable juror would have imposed the death penalty on him had they known the evidence regarding his intellectual disability.

While the appeals court had previously held that such petitions only need to make a threshold presentation of such supporting evidence to warrant a proceeding on the merits — and Texas supporting the application — it ruled Saldaño did not have sufficient evidence.

Sotomayor slammed that decision, noting that Saldaño’s evidence clearly satisfies the threshold showing and suggests his disability claims are accurate. The consensus among the experts in the case makes clear there is reason enough for the high court to have intervened and ordered a full merits decision, Sotomayor said.

“The court’s refusal to allow that merits determination to proceed not only does a profound disservice to Saldaño, who now might be executed without any court ever determining whether he is, in fact, intellectually disabled,” Sotomayor wrote. “It also severely undermines the state’s interest in ensuring the legitimacy of its criminal system. In that system, the prosecutor serves as ‘ the representative … of a sovereignty … whose interest … in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.’”

Sotomayor credited Texas for ensuring that, “if it was going to take Saldaño’s life, that grave act will comport with the Constitution’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.”

However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals failure to satisfy its “reciprocal obligations,” and her colleagues’ refusal to intervene put both Saldaño’s fundamental rights and the state’s “important interests in preventing that result” at significant risk, Sotomayor wrote.

Benjamin Wolff, representing Saldaño from the Texas Office of Capital and Forensic Writs along with attorneys Guillermina Passa and Kelsey Peregoy, called the decision “disappointing,” noting Saldaño grew up in Argentina and went most of his life without any official diagnosis.

“Every expert who has evaluated Mr. Saldaño for intellectual disability agrees he’s intellectually disabled,” Wolff said in a statement. “The state of Texas, who several years ago sought Mr. Saldaño’s execution, now agrees that he meets the criteria for intellectual disability. It is disappointing that the courts have yet to allow us through the courthouse doors to present what we believe to be overwhelming evidence that Mr. Saldaño is intellectually disabled and, as such, the U.S. Constitution forbids his execution.”

Source: courthousenews.com, Ryan Knappenberger, June 22, 2026

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but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
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