Supremes Say Yes (Sort of) to Legal Injection

Today, the US Supreme Court voted in the much-watched case of Baze v. Reese that lethal injection doesn’t violate the eighth amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

This means that California’s executions will likely start up again. (The LA Times covers the CA angle here. . I blogged in detail about the issue here and here.)

BUT….and this is a BIG but……instead of the usual majority/minority written opinions explaining the SCOTUS POV on the Kentucky-originated case, the justices wrote an astonishing seven separate opinions, so complex were their reactions to a moral/legal issue that is anything but cut and dried.

Legal experts are already madly opining that this unusual splintering of opinion, rather than settling the matter, will blow the issue open to further court challenges.

Here’s what the McClatchy folks had to say:

“Capital punishment is constitutional,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said Thursday morning in announcing the opinion, “so there must be a means of implementing it.”

But with justices filing an extraordinary seven separate opinions, and with no one conclusion gaining a majority, the complicated case, Baze v. Rees, tinkers with rather than concludes the larger death-penalty controversy.

“I assumed that our decision would bring the debate about lethal injection as a method of execution to a close,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote. “It now seems clear that it will not.”

The New York Times has one of the best follow-up pieces featuring quotes from other Supremes.

“The question of whether a similar three-drug protocol may be used in other states remains open and may well be answered differently in a future case on the basis of a more complete record,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas said “today’s decision is sure to engender more litigation” because “we have left the states without a bright-line rule.”

[SNIP]
Justice Stevens urged states to consider abandoning one of the three chemicals, the paralyzing drug that would leave an unsedated inmate conscious but unable to move, breathe or cry out. The justices in the plurality said the drug, pancuronium bromide, made executions more dignified and faster, interests Justice Stevens dismissed as inadequate.

“States wishing to decrease the risk that future litigation will delay executions or invalidate their protocols would do well to reconsider their continued use of pancuronium bromide,” Justice Stevens wrote.

“Opponents of the death penalty said the decision was little more than a road map for more litigation,” writes Adam Liptak for the NY Times. “’I think it opens the door,’ said Elizabeth Semel, the director of the death penalty clinic at the University of California Berkeley.”

Expect some of those challenges to come from California.