Hill, Paul (1954–)

In 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a former Presbyterian minister, became the first antiabortion terrorist to be sentenced to death for the murder of an abortion provider. Hill was also the first person to be tried under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances law, which was passed by Congress after the first murder of an abortion provider by Michael Griffin in March 1993.

Hill first embraced the antiabortion movement after graduating from the Reformed Theological Seminary [Page 171]in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1983. At the time, Hill contemplated assassinating a Supreme Court justice to hasten an appointment that might lead to the overthrow of Roe v. Wade; because he was a minister, Hill decided against murder. In 1990, however, Hill voluntarily turned in his ministerial credentials, leaving him free, in his mind, to follow Griffin's lead.

Although Griffin and Hill never met, five days after Griffin shot Dr. David Gunn outside the Pensacola Women's Medical Services clinic in Florida, Hill appeared on a television show, Donahue, to justify the murder of Dr. Gunn, who Hill compared to a Nazi concentration camp doctor. Within months of Dr. Gunn's murder, Hill formed Defensive Action, a small antiabortion group that advocated violence to end abortion, and drafted a “Defensive Action Statement,” signed by 29 other antiabortion activists.

Hill was quickly becoming one of the most outspoken members of the movement. His rhetoric eventually led to Hill's excommunication from a Presbyterian Church in Valparaiso, Florida, where he lived with his wife and three children. Undaunted, in December 1993, Hill appeared on Nightline to justify Rachelle Shannon's attempted murder of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Wichita, Kansas.

Hill protested each week outside the Ladies Center in Pensacola, Florida, where 69-year-old Dr. John Bayard Britton, Dr. Gunn's successor, provided abortion services. On July 29, 1994, Paul Hill arrived at the Ladies Center just before 7:00 A.M. to join the usual Friday protests. A half-hour later, as Dr. Britton and his bodyguard, James Barrett, drove into the parking lot outside the clinic, Hill opened fire with a shotgun, killing both Britton and Barrett; Barrett's wife, June, was also struck, but survived.

Hill claims he had decided to kill Dr. Britton just one week earlier; however, FBI informer Jerry Reiter, once a volunteer with the antiabortion group Operation Rescue, claimed that Hill prophesied, months earlier, an “IRA-type reign of terror” following Griffin's murder trial.

In December 1994, Hill received two life sentences for violating federal clinic protection laws, and was convicted of a Florida State murder charge, for which he was sentenced to death. Unlike Griffin, who denounced antiabortion violence after two years in jail, Hill remains unrepentant. In March 1997, following a Florida Supreme Court decision that affirmed Hill's death sentence, Hill officially waived his right to participate in the appeals process. In an interview given from the Florida State Penitentiary. Hill has stated that he is convinced he can save more babies by becoming a martyr for the antiabortion movement than by trying to save his own life.