Georgia executes death row inmate; claim of intellectual disability dismissed

ATLANTA – Georgia on Tuesday executed a man who killed a fellow inmate despite arguments from his lawyers that his execution was prohibited by the Constitution because he was intellectually disabled.

Warren Lee Hill was put to death by an injection of pentobarbital at the state prison in Jackson. The 54-year-old was pronounced dead at 7:55 p.m. He declined to make a final statement but did accept an offer to have a prayer read over him by a clergy member.

After reading the execution order, the warden left the room at 7:42 p.m. Hill kept his head raised, looking out at the witnesses, for a couple of minutes and then laid back and took a few deep breaths before becoming still.

“Today, the Court has unconscionably allowed a grotesque miscarriage of justice to occur in Georgia,” Brian Kammer, a lawyer for Hill, said in an emailed statement. “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.”

Hill was sentenced to serve life in prison for the 1986 killing of his 18-year-old girlfriend, who was shot 11 times. While serving that sentence, he beat a fellow inmate, Joseph Handspike, to death using a nail-studded board. A jury in 1991 convicted Hill of murder and sentenced him to death.

Hill was previously set to die in July 2012, February 2013 and July 2013, but courts stepped in at the last minute with temporary stays so they would have time to consider challenges filed by Hill’s lawyers.