New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday issued several decisions in criminal cases, including ones on the death penalty, testimony from children and jury selection.

DEATH PENALTY In a 5-to-4 decision, the court ruled that a death row inmate in Louisiana was entitled to a hearing to determine whether he is intellectually disabled, and so may not be executed.

The case, Brumfield v. Cain, No. 13-1433, concerned Kevan Brumfield, who was sentenced to death in 1995 for killing Betty Smothers, a Baton Rouge police officer. Seven years later, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court barred the execution of the intellectually disabled.

Mr. Brumfield sought to be spared on that ground, but was denied a hearing. A state judge reasoned that the evidence submitted at Mr. Brumfield’s trial was sufficient to resolve the issue against him even though he had not argued that his intellectual disability was a reason to bar his execution.

A federal trial judge disagreed. After a seven-day hearing, the judge concluded that Mr. Brumfeld’s I.Q. and limited abilities to perform basic functions proved that he was disabled. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, reversed, ruling that the state court had been entitled to rely on the trial-court record.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority on Thursday, said that Mr. Brumfield’s I.Q., of 75, and his difficulties with learning and performing ordinary tasks were enough to raise reasonable doubts about his intellectual capacity. Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion.

Justice Clarence Thomas filed an impassioned dissent that set out in detail the horror of the crime and its devastating impact on Ms. Smothers’s family. He took the unusual steps of posting Mr. Brumfield’s videotaped confession on the Supreme Court’s website and of including a photograph of Ms. Smothers in an appendix to his opinion.

Justice Thomas accused the majority of disregarding “the human cost of its decision.”

“It spares not a thought for the 20 years of judicial proceedings that its decision so casually extends,” he wrote. “It spares no more than a sentence to describe the crime for which a Louisiana jury sentenced Brumfield to death. It barely spares the two words necessary to identify Brumfield’s victim, Betty Smothers, by name. She and her family — not to mention our legal system — deserve better.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined most of Justice Thomas’s dissent. But they did not join a portion discussing Warrick Dunn, Ms. Smothers’s eldest son, who became a football star.

Mr. Dunn’s story “is inspiring and will serve a very beneficial purpose if widely read, but I do not want to suggest that it is essential to the legal analysis in this case,” Justice Alito wrote in a brief dissent joined by Chief Justice Roberts.

CHILDREN’S TESTIMONY The court unanimously ruled that prosecutors could use statements that a 3-year-old boy made to his teachers about being abused by his mother’s pimp at the man’s trial on assault, child endangerment and domestic violence charges.

The defendant, Darius Clark, said the secondhand statements should not be permitted under the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause, which gives a criminal defendant the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

Justice Alito, writing for six justices, said the statements were not subject to the clause because they were made “in the context of an ongoing emergency involving suspected child abuse.”

He wrote that “statements by very young children will rarely, if ever, implicate the confrontation clause,” adding: “Few preschool students understand the details of our criminal justice system.”

In a series of decisions starting with Crawford v. Washington in 2004, an odd-bedfellows coalition of justices from the court’s conservative and liberal wings have breathed new but fragile and halting life into the clause. In a concurrence with Justice Alito’s opinion, Justice Scalia, the author of the majority opinion in Crawford, deplored the majority’s hostility to the precedent.

The case before the court, Ohio v. Clark, No. 13-1352, was easy, Justice Scalia said, given the boy’s age and the setting in which he spoke. “I write separately, however, to protest the court’s shoveling of fresh dirt upon the Sixth Amendment right of confrontation so recently rescued from the grave in Crawford,” Justice Scalia wrote.

JURY SELECTION In a 5-to-4 decision, the court ruled against a death row inmate in California who said prosecutors had acted improperly in using peremptory challenges to exclude all seven black and Hispanic potential jurors from his trial. The trial judge allowed prosecutors to supply benign explanations for the challenges in a hearing outside the presence of the defense lawyers.

Justice Alito, writing for the court’s five more conservative members, said the challenges were “sufficient to raise suspicions about the prosecution’s motives.” He added that excluding defense lawyers from the discussion while prosecutors explained themselves might have violated the constitutional rights of the inmate, Hector Ayala, who was convicted of triple murder.

But any errors were harmless, Justice Alito wrote, because there was no good reason to think Mr. Ayala’s lawyers would have persuaded the judge to reject the prosecutors’ reasons.

Justice Sotomayor, joined by the court’s other liberal members, said “little doubt exists that counsel’s exclusion” from the hearing “substantially influenced the outcome.”

Justice Kennedy filed an unusual concurrence, one he acknowledged had “no direct bearing on the precise legal questions presented” in the case, Davis v. Ayala, No. 13-1428. It was, instead, an extended attack on solitary confinement prompted by a remark from a lawyer when the case was argued. “Years on end of near-total isolation exacts a terrible price,” Justice Kennedy wrote.

Justice Thomas responded in a separate concurrence. “The accommodations in which Ayala is housed are a far sight more spacious than those in which his victims, Ernesto Dominguez Mendez, Marcos Antonio Zamora, and Jose Luis Rositas, now rest,” Justice Thomas wrote.