HILL v. SCHOFIELD

• Decision Date: 18 June 2010
• Docket Number: No. 04-00151-CV-WLS,No. 08-15444,08-15444,04-00151-CV-WLS
• Parties: WARREN LEE HILL, JR., Petitioner-Appellant,v.DERRICK SCHOFIELD, Respondent-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

WARREN LEE HILL, JR., Petitioner-Appellant,
v.
DERRICK SCHOFIELD, Respondent-Appellee.

No. 08-15444
No. 04-00151-CV-WLS

In The United States Court Of Appeals For The Eleventh Circuit

JUNE 18, 2010

[PUBLISH]

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia

Before BARKETT, HULL and MARCUS, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM

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Warren Lee Hill, Jr. appeals from the district court's denial of his 28 U.S.C. § 2254 habeas petition in which he challenged his death sentence. The district court granted a certificate of appealability on Hill's claim that the Georgia Supreme Court's decision upholding Georgia's statutory requirement that in order to be exempt from execution Hill must prove his mental retardation beyond any reasonable doubt is contrary to clearly established federal law as announced in United States v. Atkins, 536 U.S. 304 (2002). We conclude that because Georgia's requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt necessarily will result in the execution of the mentally retarded, the Georgia Supreme Court's decision is contrary to the clearly established rule of Atkins. The execution of the mentally retarded is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment's ban against cruel and unusual punishment. We therefore reverse and remand.

I. Background

Hill was convicted and sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder of a fellow Georgia state prison inmate. His conviction and sentence were affirmed on direct appeal by the Georgia Supreme Court in 1993, Hill v. State, 427 S.E.2d 770 (Ga. 1993), and the United States Supreme Court denied certiorari, Hill v. Georgia, 510 U.S. 950, rehrg. denied Hill v. Georgia, 510 U.S. 1066 (1994).

Hill commenced state court habeas proceedings in 1994, during the course of

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which he raised a claim that he was exempt from execution under Georgia law based on mental retardation.¹ Hill presented the state habeas court with several lay and expert witness affidavits, which the court found provided credible evidence of Hill's mental retardation. Accordingly, the state habeas court granted his writ for the limited purpose of conducting a jury trial on the issue of his mental retardation. Upon appeal by the State, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed and remanded the case, directing the state habeas court, without the intervention of a jury, to determine whether Hill had established his claim of mental retardation beyond a reasonable doubt. Turpin v. Hill, 498 S.E.2d 52 (Ga. 1998). Under Georgia law, a defendant who demonstrates that he has "significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning resulting in or associated with impairments in adaptive behavior which manifested during the developmental period" is deemed mentally retarded. Ga. Code Ann. § 17-7-131 (a)(3). The defendant bears the burden of proving his mental retardation and "may be found 'guilty but mentally retarded' if the jury, or court acting as trier of facts, finds beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of the crime charged and is mentally retarded." Id. § 17-7-131(c).

Upon remand, the state habeas court held an evidentiary hearing regarding

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the merits of Hill's claim that he is mentally retarded. The court issued its order on that claim, finding that under Georgia's substantive definition of mental retardation Hill had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that his IQ met the criterion for a diagnosis of mental retardation.² The court made an additional finding that Hill did not meet the exacting reasonable doubt standard regarding deficits in adaptive functioning.³ The state habeas court therefore concluded that Hill could not prove his mental retardation under Georgia's stringent statutory standard, and thus, was not entitled to habeas relief on this ground.

While Hill's state habeas case was still pending, the United States Supreme Court decided Atkins, in which it held that the execution of mentally retarded offenders is categorically prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 536 U.S. at 321. In light of this decision, Hill sought reconsideration on his mental retardation claim, specifically asserting that Georgia's standard requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt for such claims was unconstitutional. The state habeas court agreed that the beyond a reasonable doubt standard placed an

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undue burden on Hill by creating "an extremely high likelihood of erroneously executing mentally retarded defendants by placing almost the entire risk of error upon the defendant." The court also commented that this high burden of proof is "unsuited" to the issue of mental retardation, especially because someone, like Hill, who is mentally retarded but in the lower range of that classification, ⁴ will be particularly susceptible to the risk of an erroneous determination that he is not mentally retarded. Thus, the court granted Hill's motion, finding that Hill was mentally retarded by a preponderance of the evidence and that Georgia's reasonable doubt standard was unconstitutional in light of Supreme Court precedent. The State appealed and the Georgia Supreme Court reversed, holding that, even under Atkins, Georgia's beyond a reasonable doubt standard of proof for a claim of mental retardation remains constitutionally permissible. Head v. Hill, 587 S.E.2d 613, 620-22 (Ga. 2003) (4-3 decision) (Sears, P.J., dissenting).

Hill then commenced the instant federal habeas proceeding, raising again the question of whether Georgia's requirement that mental retardation be proved beyond any reasonable doubt violates the dictates of Atkins. The district court denied the petition but granted Hill's request for a certificate of appealability on the

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mental retardation claim, which is now before us.

II. Standard of Review

Our review of Hill's federal habeas petition is governed by the standards set forth in 28 U.S.C. § 2254, as amended by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 ("AEDPA"). For any claim adjudicated on the merits in state court, § 2254(d) allows federal habeas relief only where the state court adjudication

(1) resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States; or (2) resulted in a decision that was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.

28 U.S.C. § 2254(d). Here, the Georgia Supreme Court's determination that it is constitutionally permissible for Georgia to require an offender to prove mental retardation beyond a reasonable doubt involves a question of law, thus we must decide whether this decision is "contrary to" or an "unreasonable application" of federal law as determined by the Supreme Court.

A decision "contrary to" federal law contradicts the United States Supreme Court on a settled question of law or holds differently than did that Court on a set of materially indistinguishable facts-in short, it is a decision "substantially different from the [Supreme Court's] relevant precedent...." Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 405 (2000).

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A decision that unreasonably applies federal law identifies the correct governing legal principle as articulated by the United States Supreme Court, but unreasonably applies that principle to the facts of the petitioner's case, "unreasonably extends [the] principle... to a new context where it should not apply, or unreasonably refuses to extend [it] to a new context where it should apply." Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 407 (2000). Moreover, AEDPA does not "require state and federal courts to wait for some nearly identical factual pattern before a legal rule must be applied." Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930, 953 (2007) (quoting Carey v. Musladin, 549 U.S. 70, 81 (2006) (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment)).

III. Discussion

In Atkins, the Supreme Court was presented with the question of whether the execution of mentally retarded offenders constitutes cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 536 U.S. at 307. The Court unequivocally answered this question in the affirmative, explaining that the execution of the mentally retarded did not advance either of the penological purposes of the death penalty, i.e., retribution or deterrence, given the diminished cognitive and behavioral capacities of the mentally retarded that render them less culpable than the average offender. Id. at 318-20. Accordingly, it concluded that

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the execution of mentally retarded offenders "is excessive and that the Constitution 'places a substantive restriction on the State's power to take the life' of a mentally retarded offender." Id. at 321 (quoting Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399, 405 (1986)). If an offender is mentally retarded, he may not be executed.⁵

Atkins did not define mental retardation, leaving it to the states to develop appropriate ways to prohibit the execution of the mentally retarded. The Court did provide some guidance to the states regarding the definition of mental retardation by citing two clinical definitions of mental retardation that it noted were consistent with many state statutory definitions. Atkins, 536 U.S. at 308 n.3, 317 n.22. As noted,...