In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the execution of mentally disabled people but left it up to states to develop appropriate ways to enforce the restriction—leading to a lot of gray area around what constitutes true mental disability.

Freddie Lee Hall appears to lie in that gray area.

Lee was convicted in Florida for the 1978 murder of Karol Hurst, who was seven months pregnant when she was abducted from a supermarket parking lot by Hall and an accomplice. She was later found beaten, sexually assaulted, and shot.

In oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, lawyers representing Hall and Florida sparred with justices over whether the state's standard of using an IQ of 70 as a cutoff for determining intellectual disability is constitutional under the high court's previous ruling.

In repeated tests, Hall scored just over 70: 71, 72, 73, 74, and 80. His lawyers are arguing that because there is a standard deviation of five points in testing—a typical amount by which the test can be off—the cutoff should be 75.

"There were six experts who fully examined Mr. Hall...and each one of them opined without hesitation that he had mental [disability]," said Seth P. Waxman, Hall's attorney. Waxman added that other parts of Florida's government—educational remediation and vocational rehabilitation in particular—use looser numbers than 70.

The court's previous ruling, Atkins v. Virginia, gave states substantial leeway in determining intellectual disability while requiring three proofs: “Subaverage intellectual functioning,” meaning low IQ scores, and a lack of fundamental social and practical skills must be present. Additionally, the presence of both conditions needs to have been discovered before age 18.

About changing the standard, Justice Stephen Breyer asked Florida Solicitor General Allen Winsor, "What is so terrible?"

"What is so terrible about doing it is you would end up increasing the proportion of people, the number of people, who would be eligible for a mental retardation finding," Winsor said.

Breyer responded, "But only those who in fact are mentally retarded."

Winsor disagreed and reiterated the complaint later, saying such a finding would be "inconsistent with Florida's purposes of—of the death penalty."

Justice Elena Kagan responded, "Well, that's just to say it would double the number of people eligible, but some of them may be mentally retarded. I mean, presumably we want accurate decision making with respect to this question, don't we?"

The ruling could come between now and June.

Maybe something that can change before then is the way the court talks about the mentally disabled. A variation of "retard" popped up 49 times in Monday's oral argument.

The r-word hasn't been used in federal legislation since 2010, when President Barack Obama signed Rosa’s Law, directing Congress to use phrases such as "intellectual disability” instead.

The court may be the pinnacle of a separate branch of government, but it shouldn't be so hard for it to follow Congress' and the president's example.