Warren Keith Hill has hours before he’ll be executed by lethal injection, unless the State Board of Pardons and Paroles or the federal courts stop the death sentence that has drawn international attention because of his intellectual disability.
On Monday, Hill’s lawyer, in a “robust” two-and-a-half-hour meeting, tried to persuade the five-member Parole Board to do what no other court has: declare that Hill’s 70 IQ should preclude him from the death penalty.
"They seemed to want to assure themselves that he is, in fact, intellectually disabled," the lawyer, Brian Kammer, said.
Experts and two judges have said he is intellectually disabled, but it was not enough to get past Georgia’s extraordinarily high standard of proving it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Lee County prosecutor Plez Hardin, who was not the district attorney when Hill was tried, talked with the board via conference call. He says Hill is “malingering” and there is evidence that he has the mind of a man, not that of a boy as Hill’s advocates claim.
Board meetings are not open to the public. Once the board decides, the five members’ votes and reasoning are not disclosed, and it’s possible that not all members will vote. The board attorney collects ballots one at a time, and when he gets three of the same vote he stops. Hill’s execution is scheduled for 7 p.m.
Hill, now 54, has come within hours of dying three times before for murdering his cellmate 24 years ago. His intellectual ability was the issue that stopped his execution the second time, in April 2013.
Hill was in prison for murdering his 18-year-old girlfriend, Myra Wright, in 1986 when he then killed Joseph Handspike. Hill said he attacked the sleeping Handspike, also a murderer, with a nail-studded board because Handspike had threatened to sexually assault him.
At his trial, three experts testified Hill was not intellectually disabled. But since then, they have reversed themselves. Also, two judges who heard his appeals ruled Hill was intellectually disabled, but said that he had not proven it beyond a reasonable doubt, a standard to meet that no other state demands.
An IQ of 70 is a nationally recognized benchmark for intellectual disability.
Since Hill’s first execution was scheduled in 2012, groups like the European Union, the American Bar Association, the American Association on Intellectual and Development Disabilities, and international media have lobbied for him to be spared. Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, have written letters urging that he not be executed. The New York Times ran an editorial last week criticizing Georgia and claiming Hill’s case was “a catalog of everything that is wrong with the death penalty.”
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court have appeals for Hill pending.
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