Sixth Circuit Overturns Death Sentence

A unanimous panel of the Federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the death sentence of a man who at age 18, kidnapped, raped and brutally murdered a 12-year-old boy.   The court’s per curiam opinion concluded that Danny Lee Hill is mentally retarded and under the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia is ineligible for execution.  In its opinion the court announced, “We hold that Hill is intellectually disabled and that he cannot be sentenced to death. No person looking at this record could reasonably deny that Hill is intellectually disabled.  In holding otherwise, the Ohio courts avoided giving serious consideration to past evidence of Hill’s intellectual disability.”   A story in today’s Tribune Chronicle reports that in September of 1985 Hill and 17-year-old accomplice grabbed 12-year-old Raymond Fife as he was riding his bicycle through a wooded area to a Boy Scout meeting.

Over the next several hours the boy was beaten, sexually tortured, strangled, set on fire and left for dead.  He was barely alive when his father found him, and died two days later.   Psychiatric experts who had examined Hill disagreed at trial about his mental capacity.  The expert hired by Hill’s attorneys testified that Hill showed signs of mild  intellectual disability.   The expert appointed by the court and the one hired by the prosecution agreed that Hill fell near the borderline of intellectual functioning but that his was not retarded.  One of the experts actually commented on Hill’s “remarkable memory.”   Prior to the Sixth Circuit’s ruling, the Ohio Supreme Court and a federal district court rejected Hill’s retardation claim and upheld his death sentence.  The year prior to Raymond Fife’s rape and murder, Hill was convicted twice for rape.