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| Supreme Court says no to inmate's case |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 05/23/2006 |
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WASHINGTON, DC - The Supreme Court's refusal yesterday to consider a second lethal-injection case suggests that the justices are not ready to decide whether the drugs amount to cruel and unusual punishment, legal experts said. The denial was issued without comment, leaving court watchers to speculate over justices' reasons for rejecting an appeal by a Tennessee death-row inmate who says that lethal injection is unconstitutional. "The Supreme Court is plainly not ready to step into the lethal-injection controversy yet," said Eric M. Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor. "It's kind of a puzzle," said Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims'-rights group in Sacramento. Used by the federal government and all states but Nebraska, lethal injection has become a major issue in death-penalty cases because of a 2005 study in the Lancet medical journal. The study indicated that a painkiller administered at the start of an execution can wear off before other drugs take effect and the prisoner dies. The Supreme Court is already considering one lethal-injection case brought by Clarence Hill, a Florida inmate on death row for killing a police officer in Pensacola 24 years ago. In Hill's case, justices are considering only whether prisoners can file last-minute civil-rights challenges claiming that their deaths by lethal injection would be cruel, not the broader constitutional issues raised by Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman. He is on Tennessee's death row for the killing of a Nashville drug dealer in 1986. A group of Tennessee doctors had told justices that the three-drug combination used in that state and most others "makes it inevitable that, over time, some inmates will suffer excruciating and unnecessary torturous pain." They also said that the state lacks properly trained medical officials to monitor prisoners during executions. |
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