US executes mentally disabled man
Date January 28, 2015 - 3:23PM
Atlanta: The state of Georgia has executed a convicted murderer, Warren Lee Hill, ending a prolonged legal fight that led to a series of court-ordered reprieves and frequently tested the state's standards for capital punishment.
The Georgia Attorney-General's Office confirmed Hill's death at a state prison in Jackson, south-east of Atlanta.
The execution on Tuesday night came at the end of a day in which state officials and the federal courts denied Hill's final appeals, which focused on claims of intellectual disability and whether Georgia law made it essentially impossible to avoid a death sentence on those grounds.
The US Supreme Court turned down the appeal on Tuesday evening. Earlier on Tuesday, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected a request for clemency from Hill, who was sentenced to death for the 1990 murder of another inmate, Joseph Handspike.
At the time of Handspike's death, Hill was in prison for killing his girlfriend in 1985.
Although Hill's appeals sometimes involved questions about Georgia's lethal injection protocols, his last legal campaign dealt with a contention of an intellectual disability. Hill, with an IQ of 70, had "the emotional and cognitive functioning of an 11-year-old boy", one of his lawyers said in a statement.
"The lower Georgia courts have said it twice: Warren Lee Hill is intellectually disabled," Hill's lawyers told the Supreme Court in a filing. "All of respondent's experts have acknowledged: Warren Lee Hill is intellectually disabled."
Lawyers for the state, however, said that Hill had not proved his intellectual disability "beyond a reasonable doubt", as Georgia law requires, and noted that he had served in the navy and that two other evaluations had put his IQ in the 90s.
"Georgia clearly does not ignore the diagnostic practices and definitions used by the medical and psychiatric community," the state said in its response to Hill's appeal.
Hill's lawyers on Tuesday filed an appeal based on the Supreme Court's decision in Hall v Florida, which struck down a state law that kept inmates with IQ scores of 71 or greater from submitting supplemental evidence to establish intellectual disability.
In that opinion, issued last year, Justice Anthony M Kennedy called intellectual disability "a condition, not a number".
Hill's lawyers argued that the ruling rendered Georgia's requirement "flatly unconstitutional", but state officials said the appeal was based on Hill's "own expansion of the actual holding" in the case.
New York Times
