Even Warren Hill, a man with an IQ of 70 who is diagnosed as mentally retarded by every doctor who has examined him, found it impossible to meet this standard of proof".
The supreme court is heavily entwined in the Hill case because it was the court's own 2002 ruling, Atkins v Virginia, that banned the death sentence for "mentally retarded" prisoners.
1. Nine doctors have now given expert medical opinion that Warren Hill is "mentally retarded" – the official terminology still widely used in the US in legal parlance.
4. The US supreme court in 2002 banned executions for prisoners who are "mentally retarded" – in other words, those with learning difficulties.
In plain English, he was likely to be "mentally retarded" and fall into the very category of prisoner who the supreme court had just declared must not be executed.
A prisoner in Georgia who has been diagnosed as intellectually disabled by all medical experts who have examined him will be put to death on Monday unless the US supreme court acts to enforce its own constitutional ban on executing "mentally retarded" individuals.
Georgia is the only state in the union that insists that death row inmates must prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that they are intellectually disabled – or "mentally retarded" in the designation still widely used in US judicial circles – if they are to avoid execution.
Hill has now been found to be intellectually disabled – or, as the courts still put it, "mentally retarded" – by all nine medical specialists who have evaluated him.
7. When Georgia banned executions of the "mentally retarded", it applied a standard to such cases that meant that death row prisoners had to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that they had learning difficulties.
The justices ruled that such executions violated the eighth amendment of the US constitution that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. 5. Just months after the supreme court ban was imposed, a Georgia court found that Hill was "mentally retarded" by a "preponderance of the evidence".
The US supreme court banned the death penalty for "mentally retarded" prisoners in 2002, but left it up to individual states to determine how they would define the condition with their own "appropriate" procedures.
