The American Supreme Court yesterday upheld Kentucky’s method of execution by lethal injection, rejecting the claim that officials there administered a common sequence of three drugs in a manner that posed an unconstitutional risk that a condemned inmate would suffer acute yet undetectable pain.

In the current cases … the constitutionality of the death penalty is not at issue, and the inmates are not challenging the validity of their death sentences. And the issue in the Kentucky case, Baze v. Rees, is not the constitutionality of lethal injection as such, but rather a more procedural question: how judges should evaluate claims that the particular combination of drugs used to bring about death causes suffering that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The current protocol used in the federal prison system and in most of the 37 death-penalty states that use lethal injection, calls for an overdose of a barbiturate, sodium thiopental, which causes unconsciousness and in sufficient doses can also halt breathing. The sodium thiopental is followed by two other drugs: pancuronium bromide, or Pavulon, which causes paralysis and halts breathing as well, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart within seconds.
But opponents of lethal injection say that in some cases, the second and third drugs may cause severe suffering. They argue that the drugs may be mishandled because most doctors and nurses refuse to participate in executions, leaving the responsibility to people with less training, and that more reliably painless methods are available.

From the New York Times

Dozens of executions have been delayed around the country in recent months. Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat, announced within hours of the ruling that he was lifting a moratorium on executions he had imposed, and other states were expected to follow. The Supreme Court itself had not imposed a general moratorium, instead granting individual stays of execution in cases that reached the court. Those stays will dissolve automatically when the justices deny the underlying appeals, as they are expected to do in the next week or two.

On another note, Amnesty International has released its account of known state executions last year, perhaps one of the few instances in which US practices can be lumbered in with the practices of countries they normally seek to guide down the path of reform. It all amounts to a blatant disregard for life, denigrated further by being subject to the whims of human frailty and error.

‘Highlights’ from the Amnesty International Report include:

• Ja’Far Kiani, father of two, was stoned to death for adultery in Iran in July.
• A 75 year-old North Korean factory manager was shot by firing squad in October for failing to declare his family background, investing his own money in the factory, appointing his children as its managers and making international phone calls.
• Mustafa Ibrahim, an Egyptian national, was beheaded in Saudi Arabia in November for the practice of sorcery.
• Michael Richard was executed in Texas, USA, on 25 September after a state courthouse refused to stay open an extra 15 minutes to allow the filing of an appeal based on the constitutionality of lethal injections. Richard’s attorneys had been unable to file the appeal on time because of computer problems; problems they had already brought to the court’s attention. The US Supreme Court then refused to stop the execution. Earlier in the day, however, it had agreed in a the Kentucky case discussed above which that led to a de facto moratorium on all other lethal injection executions around the country.