Christopher Zoukis's Blog - Posts Tagged "lethal-injection"
Sedative’s Humaneness and Availability Raise Issues for Executions
Lawyers for a convict scheduled for execution in Virginia Jan. 18 are challenging a newly sourced sedative that the state plans to use in its three-drug protocol for lethal injections. Doubts about the drug’s effectiveness, and the difficulties obtaining it have already caused other states to discontinue its use or postpone executions.
Ricky Javon Gray is scheduled to be executed for the murders of two young girls during a Richmond home invasion in which he also killed their parents. He has also been implicated in three other killings. Gray’s lawyers argue that the state’s method of lethal execution – which uses the sedative midazolam to render the condemned inmate unconscious, followed by the administration of two other drugs — first to effect paralysis and then stop the heart – is so cruel and unusual that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
They also claim Virginia’s planned first-in-the-nation use of compounding pharmacies to make two of the drugs that it needs for its execution method, purchased at a reported cost of $66,000 for two scheduled executions, calls for review by state appeals courts, and if necessary, by the highest court in the land. Virginia has passed a law allowing the state-regulated compounding pharmacy in question be allowed to keep its identity confidential.
A state appeals court judge will hold a Jan. 3 hearing on the matter. Whatever the ruling, it’s likely to prompt a request to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of sentence and a review of the constitutional issue. If the case reaches the high court, it will likely find sharp divisions there. The Court’s 5-4 Glossip v. Gross decision in 2015 rejected a challenge by three Oklahoma death row-inmates to the three-drug protocol.
In several recent executions, inmates given midazolam had protracted and apparently at least semi-conscious deaths, but the high court majority held that the inmates had neither proved the method caused severe pain nor identified a more humane practicable method. Of the four dissenting justices in Glossip, two (Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) signaled they’d welcome a case squarely challenging the death penalty as so cruel, arbitrary, error-prone or time-consuming as to be unconstitutional.
Even if use of midazolam survives legal challenges, obtaining it is becoming more difficult. European pharmaceutical firms now routinely refuse to sell products for use in executions, due to a European Union ban on exports for that purpose. And U.S. producers are also reluctant to supply lethal drugs, fearing adverse publicity. Pharmacy groups in this country have also discouraged their members from supplying drugs for lethal injections.
Short supplies and litigation recently led Arizona to drop the use of midazolam, and Ohio has postponed indefinitely its next three executions until a legal challenge to a lethal drug source confidentiality law similar to Virginia’s can be decided. Executions carried out in 2016 have fallen to the lowest level since 1991, with only 20 carried out, and all but four of those took place in just two states, Georgia and Texas, of the 31 states allowing the death penalty.
For some states, like Florida and Oklahoma, 2016 was the first year since the mid-1990s that they have not put any inmates to death. In addition, death sentences were handed down nationwide in only 30 cases, the fewest since 1972. Even so, in this year’s elections residents in three states (California, Nebraska and Oklahoma) voted to reject curbs on capital punishment.
Ricky Javon Gray is scheduled to be executed for the murders of two young girls during a Richmond home invasion in which he also killed their parents. He has also been implicated in three other killings. Gray’s lawyers argue that the state’s method of lethal execution – which uses the sedative midazolam to render the condemned inmate unconscious, followed by the administration of two other drugs — first to effect paralysis and then stop the heart – is so cruel and unusual that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
They also claim Virginia’s planned first-in-the-nation use of compounding pharmacies to make two of the drugs that it needs for its execution method, purchased at a reported cost of $66,000 for two scheduled executions, calls for review by state appeals courts, and if necessary, by the highest court in the land. Virginia has passed a law allowing the state-regulated compounding pharmacy in question be allowed to keep its identity confidential.
A state appeals court judge will hold a Jan. 3 hearing on the matter. Whatever the ruling, it’s likely to prompt a request to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of sentence and a review of the constitutional issue. If the case reaches the high court, it will likely find sharp divisions there. The Court’s 5-4 Glossip v. Gross decision in 2015 rejected a challenge by three Oklahoma death row-inmates to the three-drug protocol.
In several recent executions, inmates given midazolam had protracted and apparently at least semi-conscious deaths, but the high court majority held that the inmates had neither proved the method caused severe pain nor identified a more humane practicable method. Of the four dissenting justices in Glossip, two (Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) signaled they’d welcome a case squarely challenging the death penalty as so cruel, arbitrary, error-prone or time-consuming as to be unconstitutional.
Even if use of midazolam survives legal challenges, obtaining it is becoming more difficult. European pharmaceutical firms now routinely refuse to sell products for use in executions, due to a European Union ban on exports for that purpose. And U.S. producers are also reluctant to supply lethal drugs, fearing adverse publicity. Pharmacy groups in this country have also discouraged their members from supplying drugs for lethal injections.
Short supplies and litigation recently led Arizona to drop the use of midazolam, and Ohio has postponed indefinitely its next three executions until a legal challenge to a lethal drug source confidentiality law similar to Virginia’s can be decided. Executions carried out in 2016 have fallen to the lowest level since 1991, with only 20 carried out, and all but four of those took place in just two states, Georgia and Texas, of the 31 states allowing the death penalty.
For some states, like Florida and Oklahoma, 2016 was the first year since the mid-1990s that they have not put any inmates to death. In addition, death sentences were handed down nationwide in only 30 cases, the fewest since 1972. Even so, in this year’s elections residents in three states (California, Nebraska and Oklahoma) voted to reject curbs on capital punishment.
Alabama Executes Inmate First Sentenced to Death 34 Years Earlier
On May 26, 75-year-old Tommy Arthur died by lethal injection in Alabama's Holman Correctional Facility, ending a decades-long legal drama begun 34 years earlier.
Sentenced to death for the 1982 murder-for-hire shooting of the sleeping husband of the woman with whom he was having an affair, Arthur was scheduled for execution seven times between 2001 and 2016, but each time the state was stymied by challenges brought by his volunteer legal team.
At the time of the slaying, Arthur was on work release while serving a life sentence for the 1977 second-degree murder of his common-law wife's sister. Judy Wicker, the wife of the slain man originally claimed her husband had been killed by an unknown intruder, but eventually recanted, saying she paid Arthur $10,000, part of the proceeds she received from a her husband's life insurance policy.
Testifying against Arthur repeatedly in his trials for aggravated murder, Wicker was convicted of charges related to her husband’s murder and ended up serving 10 years. Two of Arthur’s trials produced convictions that were overturned on appeal, before he was finally found guilty and again sentenced to death in 1992.
The day before his execution, Arthur won a brief stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, only to see it lifted later the same day, and his request for the high court to hear an appeal was denied. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented to both actions, saying she remained concerned about the use of the sedative midazolam in the state’s three-drug execution protocol, questioning its constitutionality in case it failed to render the condemned inmate incapable of feeling excruciating pain as the two other drugs paralyzed his respiratory system and stopped his heart.
Sotomayor’s dissent also cited examples of apparently botched executions in recent years, and noted one federal appeals court had blocked the state of Ohio from using a three-drug execution protocol that included midazolam. Press accounts of the execution described Arthur as seeming to drift off to sleep after being given the sedative, however.
Sotomayor’s dissent also took issue with the state denying Arthur’s counsel the right to have his cellphone when witnessing the execution, in order to be able to call a court to seek legal relief if the execution appeared to be causing Arthur unusual pain. She stated the state had no legitimate reason to block Arthur’s lawyer from having his cellphone while witnessing the carrying out of his client’s death sentence, and as a result the condemned inmate would “leave his constitutional rights at the door” when he entered the execution chamber.
A federal district court judge had upheld the state’s excluding the lawyer’s phone. In February the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Arthur’s challenge to the constitutionality of Alabama’s three-drug execution protocol.
The Supreme Court’s brief consideration of Arthur’s final appeal moved his execution time from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.— an hour before the execution order was due to expire. Afterward, a statement from state Attorney General Steve Marshall said the execution had brought to an end Arthur’s “protracted effort to escape justice” 34 years after he was first sentenced, and would allow the victim’s family to begin their long-delayed process of recovery.
Sentenced to death for the 1982 murder-for-hire shooting of the sleeping husband of the woman with whom he was having an affair, Arthur was scheduled for execution seven times between 2001 and 2016, but each time the state was stymied by challenges brought by his volunteer legal team.
At the time of the slaying, Arthur was on work release while serving a life sentence for the 1977 second-degree murder of his common-law wife's sister. Judy Wicker, the wife of the slain man originally claimed her husband had been killed by an unknown intruder, but eventually recanted, saying she paid Arthur $10,000, part of the proceeds she received from a her husband's life insurance policy.
Testifying against Arthur repeatedly in his trials for aggravated murder, Wicker was convicted of charges related to her husband’s murder and ended up serving 10 years. Two of Arthur’s trials produced convictions that were overturned on appeal, before he was finally found guilty and again sentenced to death in 1992.
The day before his execution, Arthur won a brief stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, only to see it lifted later the same day, and his request for the high court to hear an appeal was denied. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented to both actions, saying she remained concerned about the use of the sedative midazolam in the state’s three-drug execution protocol, questioning its constitutionality in case it failed to render the condemned inmate incapable of feeling excruciating pain as the two other drugs paralyzed his respiratory system and stopped his heart.
Sotomayor’s dissent also cited examples of apparently botched executions in recent years, and noted one federal appeals court had blocked the state of Ohio from using a three-drug execution protocol that included midazolam. Press accounts of the execution described Arthur as seeming to drift off to sleep after being given the sedative, however.
Sotomayor’s dissent also took issue with the state denying Arthur’s counsel the right to have his cellphone when witnessing the execution, in order to be able to call a court to seek legal relief if the execution appeared to be causing Arthur unusual pain. She stated the state had no legitimate reason to block Arthur’s lawyer from having his cellphone while witnessing the carrying out of his client’s death sentence, and as a result the condemned inmate would “leave his constitutional rights at the door” when he entered the execution chamber.
A federal district court judge had upheld the state’s excluding the lawyer’s phone. In February the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Arthur’s challenge to the constitutionality of Alabama’s three-drug execution protocol.
The Supreme Court’s brief consideration of Arthur’s final appeal moved his execution time from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.— an hour before the execution order was due to expire. Afterward, a statement from state Attorney General Steve Marshall said the execution had brought to an end Arthur’s “protracted effort to escape justice” 34 years after he was first sentenced, and would allow the victim’s family to begin their long-delayed process of recovery.
