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| Court lifts stay of execution on Texas inmate |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 12/16/2003 |
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A divided Supreme Court on Monday lifted a last-minute stay that had spared a condemned Texas inmate from the death chamber. The court decided 5-4 to allow Texas to resume plans to execute Kevin Lee Zimmerman, who had challenged one of the drugs used to carry out the death penalty. Zimmerman received a reprieve last week about 20 minutes before he could have been put to death for a fatal stabbing and robbery at a Beaumont motel in 1987. Justice Antonin Scalia stopped the punishment, to give the high court more time to look at his case. The temporary stay was vacated Monday in a brief order, over the objections of the court's more liberal members: Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. The four said that the Zimmerman case should not be decided until the court rules next year in a separate case, involving an Alabama death row inmate who claims execution by lethal injection would be unconstitutionally cruel because of his medical condition, collapsed veins. Zimmerman and other Texas death row inmates have sued claiming the use of pancuronium bromide -- a drug that paralyzes muscles -- in executions is cruel and unusual punishment. Texas, the first state to execute condemned inmates by injection, uses a combination of three drugs: pancuronium bromide, the barbiturate sodium thiopental and potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest. Zimmerman had said last Wednesday that he was disappointed by Scalia's stay. "I was ready to go," Zimmerman said. |
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