That's the title of a four-part series on capital punishment in the latest issue of Creative Loafing Atlanta.
On Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments in the case that has effectively brought the state's death penalty to a halt.
In July, state corrections officials turned off the lights of the death chamber at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Ga., roughly 60 miles southeast of Atlanta. Eighty-nine men and one woman there await execution. The freeze wasn't because of faulty equipment or a change of heart by Georgia politicians to bring an end to centuries of executions. It was because the state, in its urgency to keep the death penalty a-hummin', got sloppy trying to kill Warren Lee Hill, who was found guilty in 1991 for his second murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection. Last summer, Hill's lawyers called out state officials for trying to keep secret basic information about the execution process, such as the origin of the drugs that would be used to kill their client. Hill thought he had a right to question the process. But legal debate remained over whether the inmate could challenge his execution because his attorneys and others considered him "mentally retarded" and therefore exempt from the death penalty. Since then, Hill's case has been sitting in legal limbo.
The individual articles are:
"A short history of Georgia's death penalty; Hangings, electrocution, and lethal injections - and the slow change in attitude about executions," by Thomas Wheatley.
"Georgia's long-standing lethal injection controversy; Thirteen years ago, Georgia stopped killing prisoners via the electric chair. But its continued use of deadly drugs hasn't gone so well," by Daniel Beauregard.
"Warren Hill and the future of Georgia's death penalty," by Max Blau.
"Death row's insurmountable burden of proof; For Georgia's death-row inmates, convincing the state of mental disability can be nearly impossible," by Stefan Turkheimer.
Earlier coverage from Georgia begins at the link.
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