Warren Hill Supporters Call for Late Stay of Execution
The following is an article from The Guardian which features comments from GCDD Executive Director, Eric Jacobson, on Georgia's order to execute Warren Hill, a man with an intellectual disability.
The Guardian, 2/19/13, Click here to read online.
Warren Hill Supporters Call for Late Stay of Execution - Georgia set to execute Hill, who has been diagnosed with severe learning difficulties, in spite of criticism from rights groups
The Guardian
Disability campaigners are making a last-ditch appeal for clemency for Warren Hill, an intellectually disabled prisoner who is scheduled to be put to death on Tuesday evening despite a US supreme court ban on capital punishment in such cases.
A coalition of disability rights groups assembled on the steps of the Georgia state capitol in Atlanta to plead for a stay of execution for Hill, 53, who is scheduled to be killed with a single injection of pentobarbital at Georgia's Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson at 7pm ET tonight. Hill has now been diagnosed by all medical specialists who have evaluated him as having learning disabilities.
Eric Jacobson, head of the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities, a state agency, said that if the execution went ahead it would "send a message to our society that we are not concerned about some of our most vulnerable citizens." He added a man was about to be put to death who could not fully understand the difference between right and wrong as a result of his condition.
Rita Young of the Atlanta-based All About Developmental Disabilities pointed out that even in Texas, which tops the league table of states that carry out capital punishment, Hill would not be executed. "If we were in Texas, we wouldn't be here waiting for Warren Hill to be executed," she said.
Georgia is the only state in the union that insists that death row inmates must prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that they are intellectually disabled – or "mentally retarded" in the designation still widely used in US judicial circles – if they are to avoid execution. The US supreme court banned the death penalty for "mentally retarded" prisoners in 2002, but left it up to individual states to determine how they would define the condition with their own "appropriate" procedures.
While Georgia requires a standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt", all other states say that it must be "by a preponderance of the evidence" – that is, a prisoner must be most likely to be intellectually impaired. The disability campaigners who gathered at the Capitol on Tuesday warned that Georgia had created a trap for disabled people, because in mild cases such as Hill's it was almost impossible to prove beyond doubt their challenges.
Hill was put on death row for the 1990 murder of a fellow prisoner, Joseph Handspike. He was already on a life sentence for having killed his girlfriend, Myra Wright.
The coalition of disability groups are pushing the Georgia state assembly to change the law to bring it in line with the other 49 states by lowering the burden of proof to "preponderance of the evidence". By that standard Hill would have been taken off death row long ago – he was found to be intellectually disabled by a preponderance of the evidence by a Georgia court in 2002.
"The law must be changed. It would only take two small paragraphs to change our burden of proof and prohibit those with intellectual disabilities from being executed," Young said.
She added that when they had begun lobbying Georgia's legislators, they had discovered that many of them were not even aware of the state's uniquely heavy burden of proof.
But any change in the statute books would come too late for Hill. His lawyer, Brian Kammer, is fighting for his life on several fronts as the prisoner enters his final few hours. He is asking the state's board of pardons to reconsider its decision of last week not to grant clemency in this case; he has a habeas petition filed with Georgia's appeal court; and he is also asking the US supreme court to intervene to prevent its own 2002 ruling being flouted.
Kammer is armed in these last attempts to save his client with new testimony from three doctors who last week overturned their previous evaluation of Hill. Twelve years ago, following a rushed process of examining the prisoner, they found him to be fully mentally capable and thus eligible for execution.
But they have now reconsidered their opinion in the light of a more thorough investigation of court materials and modern scientific understanding, and have concluded that he is intellectually disabled after all.
