FEATURED POST

First Third Of 2024 In Saudi Arabia: Executions Rise By 189% And Portend Another Bloody Year. At Least 71 Currently Facing Execution.

Published
Image
Since the beginning of 2024 until the end of April, the Ministry of Interior in Saudi Arabia announced the execution of 55 individuals. This figure constitutes a 189% increase compared to the executions in the first third of 2023, which witnessed 19 executions. The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights views these numbers as a clear indication of the Saudi government's continued approach towards executing and issuing death sentences, and that the promises made in recent years have become elusive.

Georgia inmate found mentally disabled still scheduled to die

Published
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.

Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 6, 2012
Location: Georgia
Related content:

Most Viewed (Last 7 Days)

First Third Of 2024 In Saudi Arabia: Executions Rise By 189% And Portend Another Bloody Year. At Least 71 Currently Facing Execution.

Published
Image
Since the beginning of 2024 until the end of April, the Ministry of Interior in Saudi Arabia announced the execution of 55 individuals. This figure constitutes a 189% increase compared to the executions in the first third of 2023, which witnessed 19 executions. The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights views these numbers as a clear indication of the Saudi government's continued approach towards executing and issuing death sentences, and that the promises made in recent years have become elusive.
Read more

20 Minutes to Death: Witness to the Last Execution in France

Published
Image
The following document is a written record of convicted killer Hamida Djandoubi's last moments before he was guillotined in a Marseilles prison on September 10, 1977. This written record -- dated September 9 -- was written by a judge appointed to witness the execution. Djandoubi's execution was the last execution carried out in France before capital punishment was abolished in 1981. Then-President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who had voiced his "loathing for the death penalty" before he was elected to office, flatly turned down Djandoubi's appeal for clemency and chose to let "Justice run its course", as he did on two previous instances ( Christian Ranucci , executed on July 28, 1976 and Jérôme Carrein , executed on June 23, 1977). Hamida Djandoubi , a Tunisian national, was sentenced to death for killing his former lover, Elisabeth Bousquet. He was executed in Marseilles' Baumettes prison in September 1977. The following text was writ
Read more

Mississippi | Biloxi man gets death penalty for torture, murder of toddler

Published
Image
A Mississippi Coast man is headed to death row for his role in the beating and suffocation death of his 2-year-old stepson — all because the toddler soiled his diaper and took too long to get a juice box out of the refrigerator. A jury in Harrison County Circuit Court in Biloxi deliberated for just over two hours Friday before handing down the death sentence against Joseph David Heard, 41, in the Dec. 27, 2021, killing of his stepson, Hayden Lee Bataille, of Biloxi. 
Read more

Cruel and Unusual: Documentary explores epicenter of Texas’ prison system

Published
Image
Every few years, from childhood until my late teens, my granddad would take me along with him to the small Texas town where he grew up—Normangee, population 522—to visit old relatives and even older graves. The drive took us up I-45, beyond the Houston sprawl, past pine forests, and eventually through Huntsville, epicenter of the state prison system. One of the city’s seven prisons was just off the interstate, and as we passed by I’d stare at the guard towers and barbed wire before turning my attention across the street to the Texas Prison Museum, which had its own mock guard towers in the parking lot. (“Prison” and “museum” were words that never seemed to go together.) Later, I learned that the museum’s central attraction was the wooden electric chair the state used for executions until 1964.
Read more

Saudi authorities agree to postpone execution of Kenyan national

Published
Image
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 13 – Saudi Arabia has acceded to Kenya’s request to postpone the execution of Stephen Munyakho that was set for Wednesday to allow for further negotiations between all parties. According to Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Korir Sing’Oei, Kenya will be engaging stakeholders in Nairobi and Riyadh, including religious leaders, to agree on the next urgent steps.
Read more

Tennessee | New law allows death penalty for child rape

Published
Image
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has approved legislation allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions, a change the Republican-controlled Statehouse championed amid concerns that the U.S. Supreme Court has banned capital punishment in such cases. Lee, a Republican, quietly signed off on the legislation last week without issuing a statement.
Read more