A visiting judge is set to decide whether Danny Lee Hill, convicted killer of 12-year-old Raymond Fife, should face the death penalty.

Retired Summit County Judge Patricia Cosgrove was assigned the case and will consider submitted briefs from both parties.

Fife disappeared one evening in September 1985 while riding his bike to a friend's house. He was found in a field in Warren and died in the hospital two days later.

Hill was found guilty in a 1986 murder trial and has been fighting his execution since then, spending the last 36 years on death row. His attorneys filed a petition to vacate his death sentence in 2002, and he's filed several unsuccessful appeals.

In 2022, the U-S. Supreme Court declined to hear Hill's case, upholding the death penalty.

Hill's attorneys are now making an 8th amendment claim that he is mentally disabled and not eligible to be executed.

Criminal defense attorney Matt Mangino told 21 News the basis for the argument comes from the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Atkins v. Virginia in 2002. The court said that executing the intellectually disabled violated the 8th amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.

Hill's legal battle has continued for almost four decades.

Mangino says the current appeal is not an appeal of the underlying verdict but an appeal of whether or not his intellectual abilities fall below the threshold set through Atkins v. Virginia.

Danny Lee Hill is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on July 22, 2026.

Between 1999 and 2018, Ohio executed 56 prisoners, but since then, no executions have been carried out.

Attorney Mangino said he believes Hill's counsel will continue through state and federal courts to have him declared intellectually disabled.