Justice for Raymond Fife and other victims delayed

In seeking to further justice by declaring the execution of mentally retarded persons unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of the United States has delayed justice in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cases. And justice delayed is justice denied.
Let's consider a dramatic local case, the brutal 1986 murder of 12-year-old Raymond Fife by Danny Lee Hill, who was then 18, and a 17-year-old accomplice. Raymond who was riding his bicycle on a path through a wooded area off Palmyra Road in Warren on his way to a Boy Scout meeting, was sexually assaulted, beaten, burned and strangled. He was found by his father, unconscious, and died two days later.
Hill was found guilty by a three judge panel -- he waived a jury trial -- of aggravated murder, kidnapping, rape, aggravated arson and felonious sexual penetration. He was sentenced to death.
Through 16 years of appeals, Hill has managed to avoid his date with, first, the electric chair, and in recent years with the needle. Now Hill will have another basis on which to pursue a new round of appeals based on his diminished mental capacity. At the time of his trial, his IQ was said to be 68, just below one of the accepted thresholds for defining mental retardation.
No one will claim Hill was a bright young man. But he was smart enough to pick on a child only a fraction of his size. He was smart enough to run away after leaving Raymond for dead. He was smart enough to launder the trousers he wore during the assault and to allude arrest for a few days. He was even smart enough to try to shift the blame to his accomplice (who, because he was 17 at the time, didn't face the death penalty, but got life in prison).
In its ruling, the Supreme Court showed a great deal of compassion for the mentally challenged, but no compassion for the victims who died and for their devastated families.
Hill was not only a vicious predator, he was smart enough to know what he wanted to do, to do it and to try to avoid punishment. He also clearly knew what he had done was wrong.
Setting a new, double standard
Ah, but there's the rub. In its ruling, the court found that a killer could know the difference between right and wrong, be competent to stand trial and still be impaired to an extent that he or she should not face the death penalty.
The court rejected the M'Naghten rule, which is the right-from-wrong standard typically used in cases involving mental impairment. For instance, Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children, obviously suffered some mental impairment, but received, and rightfully so, the death penalty. Why? Because she recognized that what she was doing was wrong.
The court has now established a dual standard by which mentally impaired persons might face the death penalty. That, along with the court's decision to leave it to the states to determine what constitutes retardation, guarantees years of appeals for Danny Lee Hill and hundreds of his peers.
This was a troublesome and flawed decision by a court that erroneously concluded that a trend by states to outlaw execution of the retarded amounted to a consensus of constitutional proportions. It also ignored the fact that some murders are so heinous that they demand the death penalty.
The court has done itself, the nation and justice a disservice. Not to mention young Raymond Fife.