Georgia loves vengeance

State officials in Georgia love vengeance. They relish it. They cherish it. They are even so intoxicated by their power that they want to execute a man that is intellectually disabled. His name is Warren Lee Hill. 

For years now there have been serious constitutional questions about Georgia's plan to execute Warren Lee Hill, a man whom all government doctors now agree is "mentally retarded."* As a matter of fact and law, such an execution is supposed by be barred by the Supreme Court's precedent in Atkins v. Virginia, a 2002 case in which the justices, by a vote of 6-3, declared that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual" punishment precludes the execution of people whose cognitive impairment renders them unsuitable for the criminal justice system's ultimate punishment.

All the experts agree that this man had extremely limited cognitive ability, but it does not matter. The state refuses to commute the sentence to life. Any show of mercy is unacceptable. And yet, no good will come of killing this man. 

Just how desperate are state officials to kill Warren Lee Hill? Not only are they willing to ignore his cognitive deficits, they are working in shadows to find the drugs to kill him. 

The Georgia corrections department confirmed that, with just days to go before Hill's death sentence is due to be carried out, it has not yet secured a batch of the medical drug in sufficient quantity to kill him. The department's existing stock of pentobarbital expired in March, and the Guardian understands that the state has turned to an unidentified compounding pharmacy in another state to try and skirt around international controls.

They even passed a law to cloak their lethal injection process in secrecy.

In an attempt to circumvent international and national scrutiny, the Georgia state assembly passed a law in March that in effect permitted the corrections department to act in secret in seeking to acquire execution drugs. The provision classifies the identity of any person or company providing drugs for use in lethal injections as a "state secret", thereby negating any public right to the information.

Clearly the spirit of Christ is dead in the men and women of the state assembly. When you love vengeance this much, the Holy Spirit has been silenced. Lord, forgive them for they know exactly what they are doing and simply do not care.