In a stunning turnabout of events, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles defied medical doctors evidence of Will Lee Hill’s mental disabilities as they proceed to execute a man with the IQ of 69. Despite last minute pleads for clemency, the man is scheduled to be executed today (Tuesday evening) in Georgia by lethal injection and will die because of an unconstitutional Georgia law, unreasonably applied against him.
From a clemency report filed last Thursday, it revealed that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles came to a decision without taking into account three states’ experts who evaluated Will Hill in 2000. In an unexpected development, three doctors recanted their own initial medical assessments of Hill’s mental state. Despite the overwhelming evidence provided by all doctors who have evaluated Hill since 1991 concluding that he’s mentally impaired, the state of Georgia insists that Will Hill should be executed.
In 2002, the Supreme Court looked at the issue of mental disability of offenders in the death row case of Atkins v. Virginia, in which it declared that such executions violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual” punishment. Today Georgia’s courts are defying the Supreme Court ruling and are rushing ahead with the execution.
Mental disabilities and death row
Proving that Will Hill has mental disabilities should be a matter of science, but penal system has always struggled to address the issue. In an affidavit, the doctors described their evaluations of Hill in late 2000 as rush jobs. They also said they did not have all the information they needed to make a proper diagnosis.
Dr. Thomas Sachy reported: “During my evaluation of Mr. Hill in December 2000, some things in particular persuaded me at the time that, as I wrote in my report of Dec. 12, 2000, he was ‘malingering a cognitive disorder’ and that he did not meet the criteria for mild mental retardation but rather for borderline intellectual functioning.”
Sachy goes on to say — “However, since that time, I have had the opportunity to practice psychiatry for an additional 12 years I have treated an extremely wide variety of patients in that time, including many who were mentally retarded. The scientific understanding of mental retardation has also expanded, and the protocols for determining whether a patient is ‘malingering’ or feigning a mental disorder have become more sophisticated, as have the scientific conclusions, which can be drawn from such behavior.”
“I have had far more experience with patients who may technically have “malingered” or feigned certain symptoms, but who nevertheless have real mental disorders.” Sachy continues: “In other words, I have vastly greater experience as a psychiatrist than I did in 2000 and I have access to better science pertaining to the key questions in Mr. Hill’s case. I do not believe now that Mr. Hill was deliberately feigning a cognitive disorder in 2000, and I believe that his responses to my questions were consistent with mild mental retardation.”
This retraction by doctors is not enough to warrant a new assessment of Will Hill’s mental state.
Jerry Givens, former state executioner for Virginia believes that there have been many miscarriages of justice based on mental health issues. Talking about the wider issues of mental disabilities and mental health he said, “The state doesn’t recognize mental illness, it sees people who do the crime. There’s no reason for the police or other officials to report odd behavior in offenders. Mostly the police, prison guards and even courts believe that the offender’s are faking mental illness. Mental illness is something nobody cares about.”
Public approval for death penalty is waning
In a recent Pew Research Center report, it declared that public opinions on the death penalty haven’t changed much recently, but capital punishment is far less supported than it was in the mid-1990s. More than 60 percent of adults polled in 2011 favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder. In the mid-1990s, that statistic was nearly 80 percent.
Pew’s findings highlight that people are becoming more concerned about the morality of state executions. It also revealed that 27 percent expressed concerns about the justice system putting innocent people to death.
Jerry Given’s whole belief in the justice system was shaken to the core when he came within hours of putting an innocent man to death. In 1985, Earl Washington Jr. was sentenced to death after admitting to the rape and murder of a 19-year-old mother. But he had an IQ of 69 and in police interviews, many of his answers failed to match up with the facts of the case.
Just days before he was due to be executed, lawyers secured a stay based on doubts about his part in the killing and in 1993, DNA evidence confirmed he was not the killer. This deeply affected Givens saying, “It shook me, if I execute an innocent person, I’m no better than the people on death row.”
Given worked as state executioner for 17 years, and in that time he executed 37 death row inmates by electric chair and 25 by lethal injection, despite having no formal medical training. Now he’s fighting for end of the death penalty in Virginia and across the state.
“God is the only person who can judge us. The justice systems can get it wrong. And getting it wrong means that someone’s life is taken away from them. It’s too heavy a load for anyone to live with.”
Jerry is still haunted with the memories of shaving a man’s head, arms and legs before execution, he has seen the fear and the desolation when a man meets the end, and he convinced himself that it was right thing to do. Today he sees something else.
“There are many (on death row) that shouldn’t be there. You can see that they are not all there. But the system isn’t there to help them or understand their mental issues, the system is there to get rid of them. This is why I’m fighting to stop the executions, and to highlight the mental state of a lot of prisoners.”
In 2011 the U.S ranked in the top five for state executions, it executed 43 people while rogue states like Yemen, North Korea and Somalia carried out less state executions. Amnesty International, announced that there are 18,750 people currently languishing on death row around the world. And the U.S penal system is very much a part of that statistic. With waning support for the death penalty why do states like Texas, Virginia and Georgia continue to carry out this unpopular punishment?
Time for change
According to Human Rights Watch, prisons were never designed to deal with the mentally ill, yet that is one of their primary roles today. Many of the men and women who cannot get mental health treatment in the community are swept into the criminal justice system after they commit a crime.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 56 percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners have symptoms or a recent history of mental health problems. Some Prisoners will suffer severe illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Studies and clinical experiments consistently indicate that 8 to 19 percent of prisoners have psychiatric disorders that result in significant functional disabilities, and another 15 to 20 percent will require some form of psychiatric intervention during their incarceration.
Unfortunately, prisons are ill equipped to respond appropriately to the needs of prisoners with mental illness. Prison mental health services are all too frequently woefully deficient, crippled by understaffing, insufficient facilities, and limited programs. Many seriously ill prisoners receive little or no meaningful treatment.
For offenders like Will Hill the system is failing them. By not addressing the crisis of mental illness in prison and justice correctional centers we are criminalizing the mentally ill, and in Will Hill’s case, we are executing them.