UPDATE: Around 3:30 p.m. EST on Monday, it was announced that a Fulton County Judge had granted a stay of execution for Warren Hill until a hearing on lethal injection drugs could occur. The hearing is scheduled to take place at 8 a.m. on Thursday, July 18.
Hill’s lawyers argued over the weekend that the state of Georgia had trouble obtaining the lethal drugs needed to execute a prisoner and therefore had to possibly use unlawful means to obtain them.
According to the Guardian, “In an attempt to circumvent international and national scrutiny, the Georgia state assembly passed a law in March that in effect permitted the corrections department to act in secret in seeking to acquire execution drugs.
“The provision classifies the identity of any person or company providing drugs for use in lethal injections as a “state secret”, thereby negating any public right to the information. It also allows the corrections department to keep secret the identity of doctors who collaborate with executions.”
Hill’s lawyers argued that because of this, Hill could be subjected to “excruciating and unnecessary pain and suffering” when he is killed. A Georgia state court trial judge agreed and forcing Georgia officials to reschedule the execution.
Hill’s Attorney Brian Kammer said the delay in Hill’s execution is only temporary right now, and his re-scheduled execution could happen as early as Thursday evening.
Original story:
Mental disability experts, law professors and human rights groups are protesting what they say is a wrongful death sentence for a Georgia inmate who is mentally disabled.
Georgia prisoner Warren Lee Hill Jr., 52, is scheduled to be put to death on Monday, July 15, at 7 p.m. for the 1990 murder of his cellmate, Joseph Handspike.
Hill’s lawyer, Brian Kammer, says the execution would be unlawful because his client has been diagnosed as intellectually disabled by every medical expert who has been asked to examine him.
According to a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Atkins v. Virginia, it is illegal to execute any prisoner who is classified as “mentally retarded,” since doing so violates one’s Eighth Amendment right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.
Hill was originally scheduled to be executed on July 23, 2012. He appealed the death sentence ruling, arguing that he should be spared from the death sentence because he was mentally disabled. But his appeal was denied. The judge said Hill hadn’t been able to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” he had a mental disability.
But one hour before his death sentenced was to be carried out, the Georgia Supreme Court decided to delay Hill’s execution for unrelated reasons.
Georgia had been using a three-drug cocktail, but had recently switched to a one-drug injection. Hill was supposed to be the first inmate executed with the new drug. The court said it needed time to decide whether public hearings should be held before switching the drugs.
Almost one year later, the drug issue has been resolved and Hill is once again scheduled to be executed. The only legal body that can stop his execution is the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The Supreme Court is probably the last stop, period,” Kammer said.
While executing “mentally retarded” people is illegal, the court never defined the term in its decision. Instead the definition has been left up to the states.
Georgia is the only state that requires a person to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a person is mentally disabled, according to The Guardian. To do so, he has to prove his disability existed before he was 18 years old and that he has sub-average intellectual functioning. In addition, a jury has to be informed of the defendant’s mental illness at sentencing.
As Mint Press News previously reported, Hill scored a 70 on recent IQ tests, and he had two former elementary school teachers testify that his mental disability existed long before he was 18.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hill’s teachers said that in elementary school, Hill could not read or write at grade level, did not interact with peers and was “virtually non-communicative.” Neither of the juries at Hill’s two trials were informed of his learning disabilities or that he had an IQ of 70, but in 2002, a Georgia judge found Hill to be “mentally retarded.”
But because Hill served in the Navy and three experts testified in 2002 that he did not meet the standards for having a mental disability, the judge said Hill’s state of poor mental health was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
However, the three experts have all recanted their original testimony.
When Hill was scheduled to be executed last year, groups such as the United Nations and Human Rights Watch asked the Georgia courts to instead sentence him to life without parole. Former President Jimmy Carter has also supported Hill, as has France.
Despite the protests, all of Georgia’s state courts have refused to rehear Hill’s case. The federal 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has also said it won’t hear Hill’s case since the court cannot stop the execution unless new evidence is found suggesting Hill may be innocent. But Hill admits to beating Handspike to death with a nail-studded board. Hill’s lawyers say the situation puts him in a Catch-22.
Rosemary Barkett, a federal judge on the appeals court, said that “the idea that courts are not permitted to acknowledge that a mistake has been made which would bar an execution is quite incredible for a country that not only prides itself on having the quintessential system of justice but attempts to export it to the world as a model of fairness.”