Last Tuesday, the town of Jackson, Georgia woke up and went to work and in the evening the sun set and no one died that day. That was not how Feb. 19 was supposed to run its course according to the state of Georgia. In the narrative that the state had in mind, around dinnertime 52-year-old Warren Lee Hill would have been tranquilized by a strong barbiturate. Following sedation, an injection of pancuronium bromide would have induced muscular paralysis in Mr. Hill. One last shot, potassium chloride, would have stopped his heart. The procedure could have taken as little as 10 minutes. It has been done hundreds of times before.
This grim series of chemical processes was halted 30 minutes before it was set to begin by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Warren Lee Hill killed two people and was sentenced to death in 1991, but he is an intellectually disabled man. The Supreme Court ruled execution of the intellectually disabled “cruel and unusual” and therefore unconstitutional in 2002, but Georgia, unlike any other state, requires that intellectual disability be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Twelve years ago, Hill’s attorneys presented an appeal backed by four experts claiming he was intellectually disabled, while the state countered with three experts who said he was not. Hill’s case had a “preponderance of evidence” in court, meaning that it was more likely than not that he was intellectually disabled. This would have been enough to avoid death row in any state but Georgia.
The case has changed since then, in Hill’s favor. The three experts who declared him mentally sound have since testified that they were mistaken and that Warren Lee Hill is in fact an intellectually disabled man. Yet the stay of execution that was issued by the 11th Circuit Court last Tuesday will only delay Hill’s death if the courts do not find his disability to match up with Georgia’s extreme requirements for proof.
If the outcome of the case does not change and Warren Lee Hill is killed, the state of Georgia will not only have witnessed a tragedy, they will have committed a homicide that could be mistaken for ordinary in modern America. Little outrage is provoked when mentally sound criminals are put to death. Since 1976, it has happened 1,320 times.
No country in Western Europe, our closest block of allies, uses capital punishment. Neither does Russia. Or Colombia. Or Uzbekistan. The United States is the world leader in economics, politics and prosperity. It is a shame that we are ahead of Third World countries in killing our citizens. Though of little practical importance, the United Nations General Assembly agrees, having voted 110 to 39 last November to call upon states to establish a moratorium on capital punishment.
The principal argument in favor of the death penalty is that it serves as a deterrent against violent crime. The logic behind this point works on an elemental level, but research shows otherwise. In 2012, the National Research Council published “Deterrence and the Death Penalty,” which found that there is no evidence to suggest that the threat of execution reduces violent crime. The death penalty is rooted in a desire for revenge — inhuman bloodthirstiness.
We would do well to ignore that primal means of thought. Killing those who kill has not and will not deal with the issue of violence in this country.