Georgia Legislative Committee Meets Today

"Panel Reviews Georgia's Death Penalty," is the AP report, via Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Georgia state lawmakers are taking a close look at a law that requires death penalty defendants to prove beyond a doubt they are mentally disabled to be spared execution on those grounds.

A House committee plans to meet Thursday to hear input from interested groups and members of the public.

Georgia was the first state to ban the execution of mentally disabled death row inmates. But it also has the toughest standard for proving that disability. Other states that impose the death penalty have a lower threshold, while some don't set standards at all.

Committee chairman Rep. Rich Golick, a Smyrna Republican, said the toughest-in-the-nation status compels lawmakers to review the statute.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation posts, "Warren Hill, mentally disabled man, tests America's harshest execution law," by Matthew Kwong.

Warren Hill is a killer on death row. He has twice been convicted of murder in the state of Georgia. He has an IQ of 70. Few would dispute these facts.

But as the 53-year-old Hill languishes in a Jackson, Ga., prison, his intellectual disability is casting a new light on the state's toughest-in-the-nation execution law, and has provoked a legislative debate on whether it's time for a change.

Hill's IQ straddles the threshold for what Georgia calls "mental retardation."

A panel of seven state and independent psychologists agrees he is "mildly mentally retarded" and should be precluded from the lethal injection needle.

That might satisfy Texas or Florida to spare Hill's life, as those capital-punishment states rely on a "preponderance of the evidence" to decide who should be put to death.

But not Georgia.

The Empire State of the South stands alone in America with a death-penalty law that requires a defendant prove intellectual disability "beyond a reasonable doubt" to win clemency.

Hill's case, however, has persuaded Georgia's lawmakers to study whether their burden of proof for mentally disabled death-row inmates is too harsh.

Earlier coverage of Warren Hill's case and the Georgia standard begins at the link.

As I often point out, mental retardation is now generally referred to as a developmental or intellectual disability. 

Because it has a specific meaning with respect to capital cases, I continue to use the older term on the website.  More on Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court's 2002 ruling banning the execution of those with mental retardation, is via Oyez.