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Death Penalty. When the real news is not in the headline!
« on: 2008-05-19 13:02:28 » |
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Court rejects appeals by 11 death row inmates
[ Hermit : I didn't initially realize this was an old article - but the penultimate paragraph deserves far more notice, inspection and consideration than it has had. Certainly I had not seen anything like this presented previously. From this article, rightly or wrongly, it seems that "all" that it might currently take to abolish the death penalty in the USA is the right case, presented by the right lawyers in the right way to get it onto the Supreme Court roll with the constitutionality of the DP itself in question. And there are sufficient prisoners on death row to practically guarantee that this could be achieved in relatively short order, before the number of Supreme Judges is adjusted to correct the Bush slanting of it. ]
Source: Reuters
Authors: James Vicini (Reporting), David Storey (Editing)
Dated: 2008-04-21
The Supreme Court on Monday followed up on its ruling last week upholding the commonly used lethal injection method of execution and rejected appeals by 11 death row inmates in seven states.
The ruling cleared the way for a resumption of executions that had been halted for nearly seven months while the justices considered a constitutional challenge to the three-drug cocktail used in the executions.
The ruling means more than a dozen death row inmates likely will get early execution dates. Officials in the leading death penalty states, like Texas, Virginia and Florida, said they planned to schedule executions that previously had been on hold.
With last week's 7-2 vote, the high court ruled against two Kentucky death row inmates who argued the lethal injection method violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment by inflicting needless pain and suffering.
The appeals by the 11 death row inmates raised the same issue, and the cases apparently had been held by the high court pending the ruling in the Kentucky case. The rejection of the appeals was expected.
The cases involved appeals by three death row inmates in both Georgia and Ohio and one each from Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas.
In last week's ruling, Justice John Paul Stevens said for the first time that he believed the death penalty itself was unconstitutional.
Stevens in two of the cases said he agreed with the court's decision to reject the appeals, but emphasized that in turning down the appeals the court expresses no opinion on the merits of the underlying claim.
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