The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by a condemned inmate who argued the state illegally substituted the drugs used in lethal injections.
The decision has cleared the way for the execution of Warren Hill. Last July, the court halted Hill’s execution just two hours before he was to be put to death. The justices granted him a stay of execution, saying they needed time to decide whether the Department of Corrections had violated state law when it replaced a three-drug execution cocktail with one drug, pentobarbital.
At issue was whether the switch was subject to the Administrative Procedure Act, which allows 30 days for public comment. The state had not followed that procedure because it said it was not required to do so.
Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Harris Hines agreed with the state’s position and lifted Hill’s stay of execution.
Hill sits on death row for killing fellow inmate Joseph Handspike in 1990 when Hill was already serving a life sentence for killing his girlfriend. Hill’s capital case has attracted national attention because two judges hearing his appeals had found him more likely than not to be mentally disabled. But appeals courts declined to overturn the death sentence, saying Hill had failed to prove he was mentally disabled beyond a reasonable doubt, and thus ineligible for execution.
The Department of Corrections changed its lethal-injection procedure after it discovered one of the drugs it was using — the paralytic pancuronium bromide — had expired two weeks before Hill’s initially scheduled execution, according to records obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution under the Open Records Act.
Hill’s attorneys argued that public comment was required because the change in lethal-injection drugs fell under a condition of the act — rules governing the “treatment” of inmates.
But Hines disagreed, saying “treatment” refers only to the medical care of inmates.
“Lethal injection may involve a drug or drugs that could be used in medical care; however, using a massive dose of a drug with the sole intention of causing immediate death cannot, we think, be reasonably described as medical care,” Hines wrote.
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