 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. 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. 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.
– 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."