Page:Tim Shoop, Warden v. Danny Hill.pdf/5

Rh Three years later in Moore, we applied Hall and faulted the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) for concluding that the petitioner’s IQ scores, some of which were at or below 70, established that he was not intellectually disabled. Moore, 581 U. S., at ___–___. We also held that the CCA improperly evaluated the petitioner’s adaptive functioning. It erred, we concluded, in “overemphasiz[ing] [petitioner’s] perceived adaptive strengths,” despite the medical community’s focus on “adaptive deficits.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 12). And we found that the CCA also went astray in “stress[ing] [petitioner’s] improved behavior in prison,” even though the medical community “caution[ed] against reliance on adaptive strengths developed in a controlled setting, as a prison surely is.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 13) (internal quotation marks omitted).

In this case, no reader of the decision of the Court of Appeals can escape the conclusion that it is heavily based on Moore, which came years after the decisions of the Ohio courts. Indeed, the Court of Appeals, in finding an unreasonable application of clearly established law, drew almost word for word from the two statements in Moore quoted above. See 881 F. 3d, at 492 (“Contrary to Atkins, the Ohio courts overemphasized Hill’s adaptive strengths and relied too heavily on adaptive strengths that Hill exhibited in the controlled environment of his death-row prison cell. In so doing, they unreasonably applied clearly established law”). Although the Court of Appeals asserted that the holding in Moore was “merely an application of what was clearly established by Atkins,” 881 F. 3d, at 487, the court did not explain how the rule it applied can be teased out of the Atkins Court’s brief comments about the meaning of what it termed “mental retardation.” While Atkins noted that standard definitions of mental retardation included as a necessary element “significant limitations in adaptive