30 minutes before the moment of his lethal injection, two courts stay the execution of a mentally retarded prisoner so that they can evaluate his case. Condemned Georgia prisoner Warren Lee Hill came within 30 minutes of being executed Tuesday night -- came within 30 minutes of becoming a reluctant martyr to a constitutional principle the United States Supreme Court first announced in 2002 in a case styled Atkins v. Virginia: Thou shalt not execute the mentally retarded. He came that close -- already well into Georgia's death penalty protocol -- despite the fact that he is mentally retarded, and that every medical expert who has evaluated him since 1991 now says so. You would think with the precedent established in Atkins, and with Hill's mental status now beyond any reasonable doubt, that the justices in Washington would have been eager to block the execution. But it wasn't the Supreme Court that came to Hill's rescue. The justices instead denied Hill's request for a stay. It is unclear tonight whether they did so because they have no interest in his cause, and thus no interest in defending Atkins; or because they were aware of two other stays issued around the same time. MORE ON WARREN LEE HILL 
 
 In Georgia, Doctors Recant Testimony--but the Execution Will Go On Executing the Mentally Retarded: The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia A Day in the Life of the Death Penalty: July 18, 2012 On Tuesday evening, it was the 11th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals, primarily based in Georgia, which blocked Hill's execution so its judges could look more closely at the startling new facts about Hill's mental status which emerged last week. And it was a state appellate court in Georgia which also blocked the execution Tuesday night because the judges there want to look a little more closely at Georgia's lethal injection protocols. This after another Georgia court, and the state's pardons board, had earlier in the day refused to help Hill. So, for now anyway, Hill will be spared. There will be no execution tonight. And now the burden is on Georgia officials to convince the judges of those two other courts -- one federal, one state -- to permit Hill's execution to proceed. I can't speak to the lethal injection issue; it hasn't been on my radar. But it's hard to imagine that the 11th Circuit is going to be eager to dissolve its own stay given the recent dissolution of Georgia's argument for executing Hill in the first place: that he's not so mentally retarded that he shouldn't be executed. 
 
 Last week, Hill's attorneys informed Georgia, and thus the rest of the world, that the state's three medical experts, who in 2000 had refused to diagnose Hill as mentally retarded, had all changed their minds. Their work had been sloppy, they confessed, and they had relied upon each others' conclusions more than they should have. They didn't adequately understand the nature of mental retardation as it related to Hill, they stated, but now they do: he is mentally retarded, they now believe, and thus should be spared. The startling recantation by the state's own expert witnesses leaves Georgia today with very little to defend before the 11th Circuit. Today, the day Warren Hill was almost executed, the state can point to no expert who is on the record in this case as saying that Hill is not mentally retarded. Let me put it another way: There is no expert evidence supporting the state's effort now. All of the expert evidence supports Hill. On the issue of his mental retardation, under Georgia's statute, the case today is about as one-sided as a capital case can be. The 11th Circuit recognized this Tuesday night in its order staying the execution: In other words, all of the experts -- both the State's and the petitioner's -- now appear to be in agreement that Hill is in fact mentally retarded. See, e.g., Affidavit of Dr. Thomas H. Sachy, at ¶ 6 ("I . . . concur with the conclusions (rendered previously in Mr. Hill's case) of Dr. Daniel Grant, Dr. Jethro Toomer, Dr. Donald Stonefeld, and Dr. William Dickinson that Mr. Hill meets the criteria for mild mental retardation and the bases for those conclusions which they articulated."); Affidavit of Dr. Donald W. Harris, at ¶ 22 ("I . . . concur in the findings of Drs. Grant, Toomer, Stonefeld, Dickinson and Sachy in this case."). In light of these affidavits, we grant Hill a conditional STAY of execution and direct the parties to specifically address whether Hill can satisfy the stringent requirements found in 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(2) for leave to file a second or successive petition. Specifically, the parties shall address the questions (1) whether Hill could have previously discovered the factual predicate for the claim through the exercise of "due diligence," 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(2)(B)(i); (2) whether he can show that the facts underlying his claim, "if proven and viewed in light of the evidence as a whole, would be sufficient to establish by clear and convincing evidence that, but for constitutional error, no reasonable factfinder would have found [Hill] guilty of the underlying offense," and (3) whether Hill's claim in this application for a successive petition "was presented in a prior application," 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(1). The second question includes the question of whether Hill's claim of mental retardation is cognizable as a claim of actual innocence under 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(2)(B)(ii). There is a lot of legal lingo there, but you can probably tell two things from the text. First, it is by no means certain that Hill's life is going to be spared down the road given the procedural hurdles in place. Indeed, there was a very strong dissent on Tuesday from Judge Frank Hull, a Clinton appointee. Second, it's a very big deal that all of Georgia's experts now have recanted. The state courts in Georgia weren't willing to confront this new reality -- home-field advantage, you might say -- but clearly the federal judges understand it changes the factual dynamic of the case. ||||| Warren Hill, an intellectually disabled prisoner, has been spared the death chamber just 30 minutes before he was due to die by lethal injection in Georgia despite a US supreme court ban on executions of people with learning difficulties. 
 
 Hill, 53, had already taken an oral sedative of Ativan to help calm himself for the gurney before he learned of the stay of execution from the federal appeals court for the 11th circuit. The court agreed to consider the issue of his intellectual disabilities in the light of a 2002 US supreme court ruling that prohibits executions of "mentally retarded" prisoners as a breach of the constitutional safeguard against cruel and unusual punishment. 
 
 Georgia is the only state in the union that insists prisoners must prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that they have learning difficulties – a standard that experts say is almost impossible to achieve. 
 
 Hill had been scheduled to be executed at 7pm at the same prison where Troy Davis was put to death in September 2011 amid massive international outcry. Davis's death, despite substantial evidence of his innocence, prompted dramatic scenes at the prison where hundreds of protesters were confronted by armed Swat police armed with a police helicopter flying overhead. 
 
 Hill's scheduled execution attracted a comparatively small response, with few protesters and campaigners present in the prison grounds as the appointed hour approached. This was the second time in seven months that Hill has come close to the death chamber: last July he was spared by just 90 minutes and the experience was repeated on Tuesday night with just 30 minutes to go. 
 
 Behind the scenes, last-ditch efforts to stave off the sentence have now mostly been exhausted. Former president Jimmy Carter repeated his appeal for a postponement, saying that "Georgia should not violate its own prohibition against executing individuals with seriously diminished capacity." 
 
 The European Union also made formal protests through the British and Irish consulates in Atlanta focusing on Hill's disabilities. "This case has raised attention around the world, with particular concern around Mr Hill's intellectual disability, said Annabelle Malins, the British consul general. 
 
 In the end, two courts stepped in to stop the execution. While the 11th circuit of the federal courts wanted to take a look at the issue of Hill's intellectual disabilities, the Georgia appeal court also wanted to stave off the death penalty to give it time to consider the process that would have been used to kill the prisoner. 
 
 Hill's attorney, Brian Kammer, issued a statement after the stay: "All the doctors who have examined Mr. Hill are unanimous in their diagnosis of mental retardation, so there is no question that his execution would have been in violation of the US supreme court's 2002 ruling in Atkins v Virginia." 
 
 "The state of Georgia remains an extreme outlier in requiring that defendants prove they have mental retardation 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. This is the strictest standard in any jurisdiction in the nation. 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." 
 
 Since last July the state has opted to use just one massive dose of the sedative pentobarbital as its lethal injection, instead of a cocktail of three different drugs. The triple injection had become problematic because Georgia was running out of the drugs in question.
– It doesn't get much more down-to-the-wire than this: Warren Hill had already taken an Ativan to calm himself for his imminent death last night. But the convicted Georgia murderer was granted a stay of execution just 30 minutes before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection, the Guardian reports. Hill, 53, also saw a scheduled execution halted last year, but this time around things are different: Now every medical expert who has evaluated him agrees he is mentally retarded, including three experts who initially refused to diagnose him as such in 2000. They recanted last week, admitting their work had been sloppy. That would seem to satisfy Georgia's near-impossible and unusual requirement that a prisoner's mental retardation be proved "beyond a reasonable doubt." Still, earlier in the day, the state parole board, the Supreme Court of Georgia, and the US Supreme Court all declined to stop the execution. It was the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals whose judges agreed to further investigate Hill's mental status. Writing for the Atlantic, Andrew Cohen hopes this case reaches the high court. That's because Hill "presents the justices with an opportunity to strengthen—to save, really—the letter and the spirit" of their 2002 ruling that established that mentally retarded prisoners should not be executed, he writes. "In that case, they tried to be all things to all people. It was a mistake. Even as they announced a national standard, the justices announced that states could weasel out of the new rule by identifying for themselves who is and who is not mentally retarded."