Georgia Executes Mentally Disabled Man
On Tuesday night, Georgia executed Warren Lee Hill—an inmate with an IQ of 70—who was unable to prove he had a mental disability under Georgia's strict legal standard.
Georgia is the only state that requires defendants to prove an intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt, the strictest standard of proof, and one Hill was unable to demonstrate in court.
Hill was already serving a life sentence for murdering his girlfriend in 1985 when he killed a fellow inmate in 1990, earning him a spot on death row.
He was originally scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in 2012, but managed to postpone three times—until the Supreme Court declined to grant him a stay of execution Tuesday afternoon.
He was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital and pronounced dead at 7:55 p.m. He did not take a final meal or make a final statement.
"Today, the Court has unconscionably allowed a grotesque miscarriage of justice to occur in Georgia," Hill's lawyer, Brian Kammer, told reporters. "Georgia has been allowed to execute an unquestionably intellectually disabled man, Warren Hill, in direct contravention of the Court's clear precedent prohibiting such cruelty."
