The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed Hamm v. Smith as improvidently granted, leaving in place a lower court ruling that blocks Alabama from executing Joseph Smith for the 1997 murder of Durk Van Dam. The justices split 5-4, with Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three Democratic appointees in the majority.

The dismissal means the lower court’s decision sparing Smith from execution stands. The case had drawn the court into a narrow but consequential question: whether, and how, judges may weigh multiple IQ scores when a prisoner says they are too intellectually disabled to be executed under Supreme Court precedent.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote separately to say the court “is not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores.” She also said the parties agreed “that the Eighth Amendment does not prescribe a single formula for weighing multiple IQ scores.” Justice Elena Kagan did not join that concurrence or write separately, while Justice Samuel Alito wrote the main dissent.

The outcome fits a familiar pattern. The court had agreed to take Alabama’s appeal, then backed away before resolving the broader rule lower courts would use in future death penalty cases involving claims of intellectual disability. For death row prisoners, the Supreme Court is generally not a winning place these days, but Thursday’s action stopped short of making new law and instead left the dispute where it started: in the lower courts, with Smith still spared.

That leaves Alabama without the ruling it wanted and preserves a lower court victory for Smith, at least for now. The unanswered question is not whether the state can proceed immediately — it cannot — but whether the justices will eventually find a cleaner case to set a standard for how multiple IQ scores should be handled when life and death turn on the answer.