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GEORGIA (USA): WARREN LEE HILL EXECUTED
January 27, 2015: Warren Lee Hill, 54, was executed in Georgia.
Hill, 54, Black, was pronounced dead at 7:55 p.m. at the state prison in Jackson.
He did not make a final statement and declined to request a special last meal, the Georgia Department of Corrections said. "Today, the Court has unconscionably allowed a grotesque miscarriage of justice to occur in Georgia," Hill's lawyer, Brian Kammer 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."
Hill was sentenced to death for the fatal beating of a fellow inmate in 1990. He was already serving a life sentence for murdering his girlfriend 5 years earlier. His lethal injection was first scheduled in 2012 and was postponed 3 times for various appeals. His lawyers had hoped a Supreme Court ruling last year that Florida's strict IQ cutoff for disability was illegal could be used to show that Georgia's standard -- which says disability must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt -- is also unconstitutional.
Less than an hour before the scheduled execution time, the high court rejected the challenge, with 2 justices dissenting. “This execution is an abomination," Kammer said. "The memory of Mr. Hill's illegal execution will live on as a moral stain on the people of this State and on the courts that allowed this to happen."
Hill becomes the 2nd inmate to be put to death this year in Georgia, the 57th overall since the state resumed capital punishment in 1983, the 5th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1399th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977. (Source: Reuters and Rick Halperin, 27/01/2015)
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