Will Georgia execute mentally disabled man who is on death-row?

WASHINGTON – Amid the cacophony resulting from the George Zimmerman verdict in Florida this weekend, another startling legal saga has been playing out in nearby Georgia, where a mentally disabled man is scheduled to be executed on Monday.

Warren Lee Hill, deemed “mentally retarded” by state doctors, has been serving a life sentence for killing his girlfriend. That sentence was upgraded to a death sentence after he killed his cellmate in 1990 by bludgeoning him as he slept with a nail-studded board.

Hill’s lawyers have long argued that because their client is mentally disabled — he has been found to have an IQ of 70 — that his execution is illegal. Executing mentally disabled offenders is prohibited by both Georgia law and a 2002 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hill’s supporters were rallying across the state on Monday asking for a delay as the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether to hear the case.

“We believe (the death penalty) is counterproductive and serves no purpose,” Edward DuBose, head of the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), said at an earlier rally.

Hill is black. There are more than 3,000 inmates currently on death row in the United States, according to federal and state statistics, and more than 40 per cent of them are black men.

“Mr. Warren Hill murdered someone,” said DuBose of NAACP. “We’re not saying he shouldn’t be punished. Georgia is about to engage in an extremely barbaric and inhumane act — to kill a person who may not even be able to appreciate he’s about to be executed.”

Hill has twice come within hours of being executed by lethal injection but was spared by last-minute court orders — one of which came so close to the wire that the death-row inmate had already eaten his last meal.

Brian Kammer, one of Hill’s lawyers, said recently that a Supreme Court intervention is “one of the last things that’s possible” to spare Hill’s life.

“All experts who have evaluated Warren Hill agree: he is mentally retarded,” Kammer said.

“Mr. Hill’s execution would therefore be a grotesque miscarriage of justice and render the Eighth Amendment a mere paper tiger. This case presents the extraordinary circumstance where an individual who is ineligible for a capital sentence is about to be executed. Mr. Hill has no recourse left but to beg the nation’s highest court to intervene.”

Hill’s lawyers attempted another tactic late last week, arguing that a new Geogia statute called the Lethal Injection Secrecy Act violates their client’s constitutional rights because it deliberately conceals how the drug to be used for his execution was manufactured and obtained.

The drug — Pentobarbital — has been increasingly difficult to obtain in recent years because its American manufacturer stopped making it in 2011 amid concerns about its use in executions. There have since been allegations that Georgia officials might have obtained the drug unlawfully.