From [HERE] A federal appeals court on Wednesday blocked the state from executing an inmate convicted of killing a driver who gave him a ride, upholding a lower court ruling that he can’t be put to death unless the state uses an untested, new method.

A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to lift a lower court order blocking the execution of Matthew Reeves, was originally was set for Thursday and could still happen since the state attorney general’s office said it would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Department of Corrections already has notified potential witnesses in the event it can move forward with the execution of Reeves, which was put on hold by a federal judge earlier this month.

EJI reported, The Alabama Supreme Court had scheduled the execution of Matthew Reeves for Thursday, January 27, despite substantial evidence that he has intellectual disability and that his conviction and death sentence are not reliable.

In 1996, when he was just 18 years old, Matthew Reeves went along with his brother Julius and several other people who planned to commit a robbery. Their car broke down, and when a passing driver stopped and offered to tow their car, Julius decided they would rob the man. Mr. Reeves was arrested and accused of fatally shooting the driver.

Mr. Reeves was too poor to hire a lawyer. His court-appointed lawyers had hundreds of pages of psychological and other records suggesting they needed to have Mr. Reeves evaluated for intellectual disability, but even after the trial court granted them funds, they never hired an expert to evaluate Mr. Reeves prior to trial.

As a result, the jury never heard powerful mitigating evidence about Mr. Reeves’s intellectual disability, including that he failed the first, fourth, and fifth grades and was placed in special education classes, but never advanced beyond middle school.

He was treated for mental health issues beginning when he was eight years old. At age 14, testing revealed that Matthew had “severe deficiencies in non-verbal social intelligence skills and his ability to see consequences.”

A neuropsychologist diagnosed Mr. Reeves with intellectual disability based on testing that revealed he had an IQ of 71 and could read at only a third-grade level. (The State’s expert found his IQ score was even lower, at 68.)

While the jury heard that Mr. Reeves was influenced by his brother Julius, it did not hear evidence that his low intellectual functioning made him particularly susceptible to the influence of others.

Matthew Reeves was convicted in Dallas County of capital murder during a robbery and was sentenced to death even though two jurors voted against a death sentence.

In any other state, the jury’s nonunanimous verdict would bar his execution. Alabama is the only state where a person can be sentenced to death based on a jury’s nonunanimous verdict.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the Eighth Amendment bars the death penalty for children, drawing a line at age 18 that put Matthew Reeves within months of being ineligible for execution based on his young age.

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that a person with intellectual disability cannot be executed, Mr. Reeves’s new lawyers presented expert testimony and other evidence showing that Mr. Reeves has intellectual disability.

But the state courts denied relief, and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed, following the same reasoning it used to deny relief to Willie Smith, who was executed in October despite strong evidence that he had intellectual disability.

Like Willie Smith, Mr. Reeves was scheduled for execution by lethal injection because he did not elect a new method of execution—nitrogen hypoxia—within the required 30-day period.

His lawyers argued that, without help, Mr. Reeves could not adequately understand or make the decision to elect a method of execution based on a form provided by the Alabama Department of Corrections. ADOC’s failure to assist him violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, they asserted.

The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama on January 7 granted Mr. Reeves’s motion for an injunction and barred the State from executing him by any method other than nitrogen hypoxia before his ADA claim can be decided on the merits.

The State appealed that order to the Eleventh Circuit, which heard oral arguments on Friday and affirmed the district court’s order on Wednesday.