Dispassionate court considers lethal injection as execution method

Published: 2008-01-07

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- In the Supreme Court's first look in more than a century at the constitutionality of a method of execution, several justices Jan. 7 seemed inclined to pass on deciding whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The oral arguments dealt dispassionately with the clinical details of how lethal injection works and how it can sometimes go wrong, rather than addressing the morality of capital punishment itself. Even Justice John Paul Stevens, generally an opponent of capital punishment, said that if the main legal question the court faces is whether Kentucky properly follows protocols intended to avoid unnecessary pain and preserve dignity then the state would probably win the case. But by not getting at the legal question of whether the procedure can cause excruciating pain, Stevens said, the case "leaves open a whole area of litigation." Since the court agreed to take the case in September, there has been an effective nationwide moratorium on executions, as lower courts and state governments put executions on hold because they use the same three-drug combination for lethal injections as the method challenged in Kentucky. The federal government and all but one of the 36 states that have capital punishment use the combination as their primary method of execution.

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