The following is from an editorial in The New York Times:
The wheels of the machinery of death in Georgia keep turning, greased by a strict federal law that prevents prisoners from filing multiple appeals.
Justice Harry Blackmun surely would have confronted the case of Warren Lee Hill Jr. — whom the state of Georgia plans to execute Monday evening — by recalling perhaps his most famous dissent.
"From this day forward," he wrote in a 1994 Supreme Court case, "I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."
Hill was already serving a life sentence for the murder of his girlfriend when, in 1990, he bludgeoned another inmate to death with a nail-studded board. He was tried and sentenced to death.
He subsequently claimed that he was mentally retarded and could not be executed under Georgia law.
Four experts testified that Hill met the generally accepted criteria for mild mental retardation. Three others said he did not for various reasons, one being that he had served in the Navy. Georgia, alone among the states, requires that mental retardation be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, the strictest standard in our justice system. The federal courts in Georgia ruled that Hill had not met this standard.
In the past year, however, the three state experts all voluntarily recanted their testimony. It didn't matter: The wheels of the machinery of death in Georgia keep turning.
Every avenue to Hill is now blocked save one: a direct appeal to the Supreme Court.
In 2002, the court ruled that mentally retarded people may not be executed. All seven experts who have examined Hill now agree that he is mentally retarded.
If that doesn't count as proof beyond a reasonable doubt, it is hard to imagine what would.