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The United States Supreme Court on September 25, 2007 granted certiorari
in the case of Ralph Baze and John C. Bowling, two convicted double
murderers, who challenged the constitutionality of lethal injection as it is
administered in the State of Kentucky. See: Baze, et al. v. Rees, Comm’r Ky
DOC, et al., ___ Ct. ____, 2007 WL 2075334 (U.S.Ky. 09/25/07).
Baze and Bowling sought certiorari review from a ruling by the Kentucky
Supreme Court on April 19, 2007 denying their declaratory judgment
application which alleged that the state’s method of administering lethal
injection was cruel and unusual punishment. See: Baze, et al. v. Rees, et al.,
217 S.W.3d 207 (Ky. 2007). In rejecting the condemned inmates’
constitutional challenge, the Kentucky Supreme Court clinically outlined
that state’s method of carrying out a lethal injection execution:
The Kentucky high court held that while both the federal and state
constitutions bar cruel and unusual punishment, these constitutional
prohibitions do not require that a state execution be carried with a “complete
absence of pain.” Id. The court pointed out that Eddie Lee Harper was the
first, and only, convicted murderer executed in Kentucky under the lethal
injection protocol and that corrections personnel who attended his execution
reported that he was asleep within 15 seconds to one minute after the sodium
thiopental was administered and that he never moved or exhibited any pain
after losing consciousness. Id.
One author of The Lancet research paper was Leonidas Koniaris, University
of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. Koniaris, and his colleagues, studied
lethal injection protocols in Texas and Virginia where nearly half of the
more than 1,000 U.S. executions since 1976 were carried out. They
discovered that medical technicians carrying out the executions in these two
states had no training in anesthesia; that the executions were not monitored
for anesthesia; and that there was no post-execution review. The researchers
also analyzed autopsy toxicology reports on 49 condemned inmates
executed in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. These
reports revealed that the amount of sodium thiopental was lower in the blood
of 43 of these condemned inmates than is required for surgery; and, more
disturbingly, that 21 of them had such low concentrations of the drug it
indicated an “awareness” of pain during the execution process. In other
words, the condemned inmates probably suffered an excruciating death,
experiencing the horrendous pain of their hearts being suffocated.
Since 1930, when reliable statistics started being kept, and August 2007,
there were 4,936 government-sanctioned executions carried out in the
United States during that seventy-seven year period. It has been reported that
during the sixty-nine year period between 1882 and 1951 an additional 4,730
lynchings occurred in America.
This was made evident following Furman v. Georgia – the 1972 United
States Supreme Court decision that effectively vacated the 408 death
sentences which had been imposed on condemned inmates in this country.
The Furman decision did not abolish the death penalty. The Supreme Court,
in a split 5-4 decision, simply held that the penalty as it was then
indiscriminately applied violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition
against cruel and unusual punishment. Following Furman, thirty-seven
states, and the Federal government, enacted death penalty statutes that
satisfied the Supreme Court’s constitutional guidelines.
The first lethal injection execution was actually carried out the year before
the Gray/Evans botched executions when Texas put Charles Brooks to
death.
But lethal injection has proven to be a less than stellar method of putting
people to death. Adopted as a “humane alternative” much like the guillotine
was in France in the 1700s, lethal injection has also produced some horribly
botched executions. One of the most publicized involved a Florida
condemned inmate named Angel Diaz who in 2006 suffered through a 34-
minute torture ordeal that involved two doses of lethal chemicals being
administered before doctors could mercifully pronounce him dead. A
subsequent autopsy revealed that the needles had been pushed through
Diaz’s veins directly into his arms. Five months later it took Ohio prison
officials 90 minutes to dispatch Christopher Newton to the other side of life.
The process was so drawn out as prison officials tried to locate a suitable
vein that the procedure was halted to allow Newton to take a bathroom
break. At one point Newton became so frustrated with the “lethal injection”
process that he asked prison officials, “can you just give me something by
mouth to end this?”
What is the immediate impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to examine
the constitutionality of the lethal injection protocol in the State of Kentucky?
Gov. Perry’s office made its position quite clear only moments after the
Supreme Court grant certiorari in the Kentucky case. Krista Moody, a Perry
spokesperson, informed the media that executions in Texas would continue
because “right now the issue only affects Kentucky.”
On September 27, two days after it granted certiorari in the Kentucky case
and one day after it allowed Richard to be put to death, the U.S. Supreme
Court halted the execution of Texas condemned murderer Carlton Thomas
just hours before it was to be carried out. While the Supreme Court did not
give any specific reason for blocking Thomas’ execution, most court
observers attribute his stay to the Kentucky case.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had earlier refused to stay Thomas’
execution, sending its signal that it does not feel any constitutional need to
halt executions pending review of the lethal injection issue by the Supreme
Court. And Gov. Perry’s office reiterated its position that executions would
continue in Texas because the Supreme Court’s action applies only to the
State of Kentucky.
The U.S. Supreme Court has a number of options in the Kentucky case: it
can declare lethal injections unconstitutional, order the removal of one or
more drugs in the protocol, or order Kentucky to revise the entire three-drug
protocol with more effective chemicals.
While it is uncertain what the Supreme Court will do in the Kentucky case,
what is certain is that executions will continue in the United States in the
same manner in which they have since Gilmore was put to death.
In April 1996 former President Bill Clinton signed into law the
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act which severely limited access
to the federal writ of habeas corpus by state prisoners. AEDPA, as it is
known in the courts, was enacted to allow states to speed up the death
penalty process. The Act has certainly accomplished that objective: 70
percent of the 1090 post-Gilmore executions were carried out in the ten-year
period since 1996 while 30 percent were carried out during the previous 20-
year period between 1976 and 1996.
The death penalty in America has a sordid and ugly history with the
questionable executions of Nicola Sacco and Vanzetta, Bruno Hauptman,
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Caryl Chessman. But it will be the lesser
celebrated post-Gilmore executions fueled by AEDPA that will one day be
the real stain on American history.