Supreme Court decides on lethal injection

The Supreme Court equivalent of a bar brawl erupted on the bench Monday, as the justices’ ruling on a case that is technically about a lethal injection drug in Oklahoma got overshadowed by a heated side debate over the larger question of the death penalty, period.

In the case, Glossip v. Gross, conservative justices voted 5–4 that Oklahoma is allowed to use a lethal injection drug that may cause a defendant severe pain. The decision in Monday’s case, written by Justice Samuel Alito, was mostly about Oklahoma’s drugs; so was the dissent, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

In upholding Oklahoma’s use of a controversial lethal injection drug on Monday, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that it seems “very likely” to him that the death penalty deters crime, and he cherry-picked several studies in his defense. But what seems “very likely” to Scalia apparently doesn’t seem so likely to criminologists and other experts who have studied this issue.

The Death Penalty Information Center, one of the top nonpartisan sources for information about capital punishment, summarized a 2009 survey in which a large majority of criminologists said the death penalty isn’t proven to deter homicides:

Justice Antonin Scalia got the ruling he wanted in Glossip v. Gross, the Supreme Court’s death penalty decision that came down Monday — but he still felt the need to express his views in his characteristic strongly-worded rhetoric, this time aimed at two liberals on the court.

What annoyed Scalia so much wasn’t the main dissent in the case, signed onto by all four of the court’s liberals, but a separate dissent written by Justice Stephen Breyer and signed onto by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The two called on the Court to reassess whether the death penalty was constitutional at all, and said they had both come to believe that it “now likely constitutes a legally prohibited ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’”

The Supreme Court on Monday decided that Oklahoma may continue the use of the controversial sedative midazolam for lethal injections — even after the drug was linked to several botched executions in 2014.

The Supreme Court case dealt with the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma. The Lockett execution, which took 43 minutes after experimental lethal injection drugs were administered, led four inmates — one of whom was executed before the Supreme Court decided the issue — to file a lawsuit challenging Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol. The Supreme Court ultimately decided the botched execution, along with other evidence, wasn’t adequate proof that midazolam was cruel and unusual punishment.

At least 4 percent of people who receive death sentences in the United States are likely innocent, a 2014 study finds.

That doesn’t just include current death row inmates: many people who initially get death sentences end up getting their sentences reduced to life in prison. And no prisoner serving a life sentence gets the same level of scrutiny as someone on death row. For this reason, the authors conclude that the rate of false convictions in life-imprisonment cases is probably much higher.

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, just allowed Oklahoma to keep using its experimental lethal-injection drugs even though they could be leading to an extremely painful death. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote the dissent in the case for the court’s liberal justices, thinks that this is what the decision amounts to:

The conservative justices, led by Justice Samuel Alito, found that there was enough evidence that the drugs were safe to let the executions go forward. Sotomayor and the liberals, on the other hand, maintain that there’s a scientific consensus that the drugs Oklahoma uses can’t reliably knock someone out before killing him.

Read our full explainer on the case here.

Read the full opinion here:

In 2014, it took the state of Oklahoma 43 minutes to execute Lockett. Observers reported that Lockett “struggled violently, groaned, and writhed” for a few minutes after executioners started the injection. After 20 minutes, Lockett was still alive, and the state stopped pumping the execution drugs into his IV. Lockett died 43 minutes after his execution began.

The death penalty is constitutional in the US, as long as states use a method that is relatively safe and relatively painless. In recent years, it’s become harder — and arguably impossible — for states to meet that standard. States have faced a drug shortage as pharmaceutical companies have pulled out of (or been banned from exporting to) the execution market. With reliable injections no longer available, states are flying blind, testing unproven combinations — drugs that might cause a lot of pain.

Support for the death penalty is rooted not in how well the policy works, but rather in Americans’ belief that it’s a moral necessity. Here’s why so many people are concerned about the death penalty — and why others still support it.

In 1972, the US Supreme Court banned the death penalty, saying the way it was then being practiced in the states constituted an “arbitrary punishment” that violated the Eighth and 14th Amendments. In 1976, the Court ruled that states had fixed their death penalty policies, and states began executing prisoners again.

An execution in Oklahoma took an extra-horrifying turn on Tuesday:

This is typically referred to as a “botched” execution. In this particular case, Oklahoma was using an untested combination of drugs to kill the prisoner — which the state was experimenting with after European drug manufacturers stopped selling pentobarbital and sodium thiopental for lethal injections in the US.