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U.S. Supreme Court Won’t Take Up Warren Lee Hill Case

October 7th, 2013

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to take up the case of Warren Lee Hill Jr., a Georgia death row inmate convicted of two murders. Hill’s attorneys claim he is mentally disabled and should not be executed.

At issue in the case was whether or not Georgia’s law requiring a defendant to prove mental retardation beyond a reasonable doubt is constitutional. Attorneys for Hill claim his intellectual disability makes him ineligible for the death penalty under a 2002 ruling by the U-S Supreme court. They also asked justices to allow a new hearing for Hill because state experts who originally claimed Hill was not mentally disabled have now changed their minds.

Attorney Brian Kammer represents Hill and serves as Executive Director of the Georgia Resource Center.

“I think it’s an incredibly sad day. It’s a demoralizing day. It’s a day that makes you lose faith in the constitution…I think it means that other states can erect impossibly high burdens to proving mental retardation, so that even people who are almost certainly mentally retarded will end up being executed.”

But even though Hill’s petition on this issue is over, a separate appeal is still pending before the Georgia Supreme Court. In that appeal, justices will review the constitutionality of a new state law which protects the identity of the source of the drugs Georgia uses in executions. However, WABE’s legal analyst Page Pate says it’s unlikely the state’s high court will stop Hill’s execution.

“The only thing that remains is this the real procedural challenge to the way the execution drug is obtained and the method they have in the department of corrections for scheduling and going forward with the execution itself. Almost no matter how the Georgia Supreme Court rules they could still go forward with the Warren Lee Hill execution.”

The Georgia Attorney General’s office declined to comment on the case. Hill was sentenced to die for a 1990 beating death of a fellow inmate. At the time, he was already serving a life sentence for the murder of his girlfriend. She was shot 11 times.