ATLANTA — A federal appeals court this week upheld the death penalty for a man who now claims he is mentally retarded.
Warren Lee Hill Jr. did not claim mental retardation during his 1991 trial. However, in 1996, Lee added to a “habeas petition to allege mental retardation for the first time, and he later claimed that Georgia’s reasonable doubt standard of proof (state law) violated the Eighth Amendment,” according to an opinion from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Hill was sentenced to death for the 1991 slaying of a fellow inmate.
The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the court noted, “mandates that this federal court leave the Georgia Supreme Court decision alone—even if we believe it incorrect or unwise—and affirm in this case,” Judge Frank Hull wrote in the majority opinion.
Georgia was the first state to declare that the mentally retarded should not be executed.
“Georgia law provides that defendants accused of murder may avoid the death penalty if they prove that they are mentally retarded beyond a reasonable doubt,” Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote in a separate opinion. “Hill could have raised this defense during the guilt phase of his 1991 criminal trial; for some reason, he did not.”
“…Hill should have attacked the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard applied during his state post-conviction hearing. Instead, he asks this court for a writ of habeas corpus—and not an evidentiary hearing—to remedy this alleged due process violation,” Tjoflat added. “I would therefore affirm the denial of Hill’s petition because due process violations during state post-conviction proceedings are not grounds for habeas relief.”
