Inmate is executed after SCOTUS stay denial in litigation over mental-disability proof
Georgia inmate Warren Lee Hill was put to death on Tuesday after the U.S. Supreme Court declined a stay of execution in a battle over the state’s standard to determine intellectual disability.
Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from a stay denial by the U.S. Supreme Court, one of two stays in Hill’s case denied by the high court on Tuesday, SCOTUSblog reports. The New York Times and the Associated Press also have stories.
Hill was executed for killing another inmate while serving a life sentence for the murder of his girlfriend. His lawyers had contended Hill was intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for the death penalty under Supreme Court precedent. They had challenged Georgia’s “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for proof of mental disability, the toughest standard in the nation.
Hill’s lawyer, Brian Kammer of the Georgia Resource Center, issued a statement after the Supreme Court refused to stay the execution. “Today, the court has unconscionably allowed a grotesque miscarriage of justice to occur in Georgia,” he said. “Georgia has been allowed to execute an unquestionably intellectually disabled man, Warren Hill, in direct contravention of the court’s clear precedent prohibiting such cruelty.”
