Warren Hill facing legal uncertainty despite stay of execution Warren Hill was spared execution but was dealt a blow with the news that the US supreme court declined to hear his case. Warren Hill, the intellectually disabled prisoner in Georgia who came within half an hour of being put to death on Tuesday night, was in a state of legal uncertainty on Wednesday as lawyers struggle to work out what happens next. With about 30 minutes to go before Hill was injected with a fatal dose of the sedative pentobarbital, two separate courts stepped in to impose a temporary delay in the proceedings. The federal appeals court in Atlanta ordered that the execution should be delayed for at least 30 days, while a Georgia court of appeals imposed its own stay to give the courts more time to consider the propriety of the single lethal injection as a method of killing. The interventions take Hill, 52, out of immediate peril. But his position remains precarious given the temporary nature of the postponements. While he was spared execution, Hill was delivered a serious blow in the form of a denial by the US supreme court to hear his case. That decision means that Hill's options would be limited, should he come close to execution again. It was unclear why the supreme court declined to hear the case - whether in deference to lower courts or for a more fundamental reason. 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. 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. But in a catch-22, the supreme court allows individual states to determine how they define the condition, and Georgia is the only state in the union that requires prisoners to prove it "beyond a reasonable doubt" - a standard that experts say is almost impossible to achieve. His scheduled execution attracted a comparatively small response, with few protesters and campaigners present in the prison grounds as the appointed hour approached. Before the stay of execution, former president Jimmy Carter repeated his appeal for a postponement, saying: "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. 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. One of the issues that must now be considered is the method of execution in Georgia.