Supreme Court upholds use of lethal injections

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court upheld the most common method of lethal injection executions Wednesday, clearing the way for states to resume executions that have been on hold for nearly 7 months.\nThe justices, by a 7-2 vote, turned back a constitutional challenge to the procedures in place in Kentucky, which uses three drugs to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates. Similar methods are used by roughly three dozen states.\nThe governor of Virginia lifted his state’s moratorium on executions two hours after the high court issued its ruling.\n“We ... agree that petitioners have not carried their burden of showing that the risk of pain from maladministration of a concededly humane lethal injection protocol, and the failure to adopt untried and untested alternatives, constitute cruel and unusual punishment,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in an opinion that garnered only three votes. Four other justices, however, agreed with the outcome.\nRoberts’ opinion did leave open subsequent challenges to lethal injection practices if a state refused to adopt an alternative method that significantly reduced the risk of severe pain.\nJustices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented.\nExecutions have been on hold since September, when the court agreed to hear the Kentucky case. There was no immediate indication when they would resume, but prosecutors in several states said they would seek new execution dates if the court ruled favorably in the Kentucky case.\nForty-two people were executed last year among more than 3,300 people on death row across the country. Another roughly two dozen executions did not go forward because of the Supreme Court’s review, death penalty opponents said.\nThe argument against the three-drug protocol is that if the initial anesthetic does not take hold, the other two drugs can cause excruciating pain. One of those drugs, a paralytic, would render the prisoner unable to express his discomfort.\nThe case before the court came from Kentucky, where two death row inmates did not ask to be spared execution or death by injection. Instead, they wanted the court to order a switch to a single drug, a barbiturate, that causes no pain and can be given in a large enough dose to cause death.\nAt the very least, they said, the state should be required to impose tighter controls on the three-drug process to ensure that the anesthetic is given properly.\nRoberts said the one-drug method, frequently used in animal euthanasia, “has problems of its own, and has never been tried by a single state.”\nKentucky has had only one execution by lethal injection and it did not present any obvious problems, both sides in the case agreed.\nBut executions elsewhere, in Florida and Ohio, took much longer than usual, with strong indications that the prisoners suffered severe pain in the process. Workers had trouble inserting the IV lines that are used to deliver the drugs.\nRoberts said “a condemned prisoner cannot successfully challenge a state’s method of execution merely by showing a slightly or marginally safer alternative.”\nGinsburg, in her dissent, said her colleagues should have asked Kentucky courts to consider whether the state includes adequate safeguards to ensure a prisoner is unconscious and thus unlikely to suffer severe pain.\nJustice John Paul Stevens, while agreeing with the outcome, said the court’s decision would not end the debate over lethal injection. \n“I am now convinced that this case will generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol, and specifically about the justification for the use of the paralytic agent, pancuronium bromide, but also about the justification for the death penalty itself,” Stevens said.\nStevens suggested that states could spare themselves legal costs and delays in executions by eliminating the use of the paralytic.\nTy Alper, a death penalty opponent and associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, said he expects challenges to lethal injections will continue in several states.\nThe Rev. Pat Delahanty, head of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said the ruling wasn’t a surprise.\n“We never expected it to do more than maybe slow down executions in Kentucky or elsewhere,” Delahanty said. “We’re going to be facing some executions soon.”