The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday stayed the execution of condemned killer Warren Hill, but not for the reason his case attracted national attention.
For more than a decade, Hill’s lawyers have sought to halt the execution on grounds the 52-year-old is mentally disabled. But Monday, with less than two hours to spare, the state high court unanimously granted the stay to determine whether a recent change to Georgia’s lethal-injection protocol violates state law. The court agreed to hear Hill’s appeal of a Fulton County judge’s decision issued earlier in the day.
Separately, by a 6-1 vote, the court declined to hear Hill’s appeal challenging the state’s standard to determine whether an inmate is mentally disabled and thus ineligible for execution. Justice Robert Benham, the lone dissenter, said he would not allow the execution because Hill has been found to have a mental disability.
Hill is on death row for the 1990 bludgeoning death of a fellow inmate at a southwest Georgia prison. At the time, he was serving a life sentence for killing his 18-year-old girlfriend in 1985.
Hill’s case attracted the attention of national and state advocacy groups for the developmentally disabled, who had asked for Hill to be allowed to serve the rest of his life in prison without parole. Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, had made a similar plea for mercy.
In 1988, Georgia became the first state in the country to ban the execution of the “mentally retarded.” More than a decade later, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited it nationwide.
Hill’s case is unusual because two judges hearing his appeals in the years following his 1991 trial found Hill more likely than not to be mentally disabled.
But Hill has been unable to clear the stringent burden-of-proof standard required of capital defendants under Georgia’s law: beyond a reasonable doubt. Georgia is the only state in the country to use such a strict standard, and it has been criticized by Hill’s lawyers who say it will result in the executions of the mentally disabled.
Hill learned his 7 p.m. execution had been called off after he had already eaten what he must have thought was going to be his final meal. He had decided to eat the same fare served Monday to inmates at the state prison in Jackson: bean and beef burrito, rice, corn, collard greens and cookies. He was given his pre-execution physical and had been taken to a holding cell near the death chamber.
“I’m just profoundly grateful the Supreme Court granted this stay,” Brian Kammer, one of Hill’s lawyers, said. “A terrible miscarriage of justice was avoided, for now.”
It could be months before the state Supreme Court decides Hill’s appeal. The court’s self-imposed deadline calls for a decision by April 14 of next year, perhaps enough time for advocates for the developmentally disabled to ask the state Legislature to change the state’s burden of proof for “mental retardation” claims.
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