In 1988, Georgia became the first state in the nation to ban executions of the mentally disabled.
ATLANTA — Georgia has scheduled the execution of Warren Hill, who sits on death row even though a state judge previously found him to be mentally disabled.
A death warrant signed Monday calls for Hill to be put to death by lethal injection. Department of Corrections Commissioner Brian Owens set Hill's execution for 7 p.m. July 18 at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson.
Hill is on death row for bludgeoning to death inmate Joseph Handspike in 1990. At the time, Hill was serving a life sentence at the Lee Correctional Institution in Leesburg for killing his girlfriend.
"Executing Warren Hill, a 52-year-old man whom a court has found to be more likely than not mentally retarded, would be a terrible miscarriage of justice," said Brian Kammer, one of Hill's lawyers. Kammer said he will ask the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Hill clemency.
In 1988, Georgia became the first state in the nation to ban executions of the mentally disabled. Lawmakers enacted the law in response to the 1986 execution of Jerome Bowden, who had been found to have the mentality of a 12-year-old.
In passing the law, the Legislature required capital defendants to prove "mental retardation" beyond a reasonable doubt, the same standard required of juries to convict someone of a crime. Today, Georgia is the only state that sets such a high burden of proof for such claims.
When the U.S. Supreme Court barred executions of the mentally disabled in 2002, it left it up to the states to set their own guidelines.
Hill's problem is that a state judge found Hill to be mentally disabled, but under the lowest legal threshold — by a preponderance of the evidence (or more likely than not).
In 2003, the Georgia Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, reversed the state judge's decision and reinstated Hill's death sentence because he had failed to clear the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt threshold.
In November, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled, by a 7-4 vote, that Georgia death penalty defendants such as Hill must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are mentally disabled to be ineligible for execution.
Hill's lawyers appealed that decision, but the U.S. Supreme Court recently decided not to hear it.
