Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court issued what was perhaps the most significant death penalty ruling in a decade when it rejected Florida's standard for putting to death defendants who may be intellectually disabled. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that capital punishment for the intellectually disabled is unconstitutional. But Florida was one of several states that was arguably doing it anyway, by making the standard for proving disability so onerous that almost no one could meet it.

While the Supreme Court only struck down Florida's law, the ruling paved the way to challenge other state provisions that make it near-impossible to prove that a state is about to illegally put an intellectually disabled man to death, such as those in Georgia and Texas. But this week, a county judge rejected a legal challenge in Georgia, finding that death row inmate Warren Hill has "not cited any new law or evidence sufficient to overcome the procedural bar."

Seven different mental health experts who have evaluated Hill all now agree that he has an intellectual disability (previously referred to by the courts as "mentally retarded."). Hill also has an IQ score of 70. But all of that wasn't enough to meet Georgia's near-impossible standard of proving mental disability beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus, Warren Hill remains on death row.

In its Supreme Court decision last may, Justice Anthony Kennedy invalidated a Florida standard that allowed one IQ score for death row inmate Freddie Lee Hall to be the sole determinant of whether he had an intellectual disability and would be sent to death. "This rigid rule, the Court now holds, creates an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed, and thus is unconstitutional," Kennedy wrote for a five-justice majority.

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Kennedy's ruling did not address the ways that other states like Georgia have created an equally high risk that individuals with an intellectual disability will be executed. But Kennedy did reaffirm the constitutional commitment to protecting vulnerable populations like the intellectual disabled. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that "death is not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal," reasoning that their disability "places them at special risk of wrongful execution." Executing an intellectually disabled inmate also does not serve the typical goals of punishment. It is inherently not rehabilitative. And it is particularly unlikely to deter crimes or serve as a meaningful punishment to those criminals who are incapable of understanding the nature of their acts.

Kennedy wrote that "Florida's law contravenes our Nation's commitment to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as the mark of a civilized world. The States are laboratories for experimentation, but those experiments may not deny the basic dignity the Constitu­tion protects."

Despite this brand new Supreme Court precedent, Butts County Superior Court Judge Thomas H. Wilson concluded that, "This Court is of the opinion that the Hall [v. Florida] case is not sufficiently on point to justify a Habeas decision overturning the current Georgia law."

Hill's motion to have his death sentence reconsidered was thus dismissed by Wilson, but not before Wilson encouraged the Georgia Supreme Court to review the case. "In light of the severity of the penalty in this case, this Court hopes that, in reviewing Petitioner's application to appeal, the court will fully consider any application of Hall v. Florida to Petitioner's case." He notes that Warren's case would "in its factual concept be a perfect and definitive decision in this area of law."

In its ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court only addressed Florida's standard, which allowed a court to rule on a defendant's disability based on one administration of an IQ test, even when other factors and even other IQ tests suggested intellectual disability.