WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld the use of a controversial drug for lethal injection in executions.
The ruling was 5-4. While Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the principle descent, Justice Stephen Breyer in a separate dissent called the institution of the death penalty itself into question.
“But rather than try to patch up the death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time, I would ask for full briefing on a more basic question: whether the death penalty violates the Constitution,” Breyer wrote.
Three death row inmates — Richard E. Glossip, John M. Grant and Benjamin R. Cole — brought the challenge arguing that the drug midazolam violates the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because it fails to generate “a deep, coma like unconsciousness.”
Another plaintiff in the case, Charles F. Warner, was put to death , apparently without incident, before the Court agreed to take up the case.
Oklahoma uses an intravenous injection of midazolam to cause unconsciousness and follows it with a paralytic and then a third drug meant to serve as a heart-stopping agent.
But Robin C. Konrad, a lawyer for the prisoners, told the justices that midazolam “can never maintain the deep coma-like unconsciousness that is necessary to prevent a prisoner” from feeling the painful effects of the other two drugs in the protocol.
Six states – Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Virginia – have midazolam as an option in for use in lethal injections in their protocols.
The Supreme Court hearing revealed a deep tension on the part of some of the conservatives on the bench who expressed concern that the opponents to the death penalty are making it very difficult for the states to carry out executions using lethal doses of drugs.
“Let’s be honest about what’s going on here,” said Justice Samuel Alito. He suggested that executions could be carried out painlessly but those who oppose the death penalty are conducting “what amounts to a guerrilla war” consisting of efforts to make it impossible for the states to “obtain drugs that could be used to carry out capital punishment with little, if any pain.”
But the liberals, led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned the use of the drug as well as the state’s case.
In 2008, the Supreme Court upheld Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol, but that case concerned a different combination of drugs that is no longer being used.
In court papers, Patrick Wyrick, the Solicitor General of Oklahoma said the state has improved its protocol since Lockett’s death and that the current protocol “does not present a substantial risk of severe pain and cannot be considered cruel.”
He described the crimes committed by the inmates including the fact that Glossip “hired his coworker to kill their employer by beating him to death with a baseball bat,” and that Benjamin Cole “murdered his nine-month old daughter by snapping her spine in half.”
In court, he told the justices that a lower court found that a 500 milligram dose of midazolam would “with near certainty, render these petitioners unconscious and unable to feel pain.”
The case comes when 70% of Americans say they don’t consider the death penalty itself to be “cruel and unusual punishment,” according to a recent CNN/ORC poll.
