⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

The Supreme Court considers whether Dexter Johnson can pursue an intellectual-disability challenge to his Texas death sentence. Johnson was convicted of capital murder in 2007, following a robbery, kidnapping, and killing in 2006. His trial expert did not diagnose intellectual disability, and Johnson did not bring that intellectual-disability claim in his first federal habeas proceeding. Later, diagnostic guidelines published in 2013, known as the DSM-five, reduced emphasis on rigid IQ thresholds and increased attention to adaptive functioning, the practical skills needed in everyday life. Evaluations obtained for Johnson in 2019 supported an intellectual-disability diagnosis under the updated standards. Johnson says his condition did not newly develop; what changed was the framework for recognizing it. That history matters because Atkins versus Virginia, decided in 2002, prohibits executing people with intellectual disability. But that constitutional rule existed before Johnson's crime and his first federal petition. Federal law sharply limits second or successive habeas petitions, even when a prisoner seeks to challenge a sentence rather than a conviction. This is a separate collateral challenge, not another direct appeal. One gateway permits claims relying on a previously unavailable new rule of constitutional law that the Supreme Court has made retroactive. The lower federal courts allowed Johnson's claim to cross that gateway; they did not decide in these rulings that he is intellectually disabled. Texas's prison director is asking the Supreme Court to reverse that procedural ruling. Texas will argue that Atkins was already available and that new diagnostic evidence is not a new constitutional rule. The United States will also support Texas. Johnson will answer that an existing rule was not truly available when the governing diagnostic framework left his disability claim with no possibility of merit. Listen for the difference between a rule existing and a rule being usable, and between a new constitutional rule and new medical information. Also keep two questions separate: whether another petition may proceed, and whether Johnson ultimately meets the legal standard for intellectual disability.

Guerrero v. Johnson (No. 25-1003) — Supreme Court of the United States, argued November 4, 2026.