Bad Signs for Baze
By It’s been buried by NH primary news, but it’s worth noting that the Supreme Court heard Baze v. Rees yesterday. The case challenges Kentucky’s use of a three-drug cocktail to execute the condemned.
By all accounts, it does not look good for Baze, who is challenging the procedure. As Linda Greenhouse recounts this morning, even Justice Stevens appeared during oral argument to be heading down the path of least resistance; he suggested that he would avoid the constitutional 8th Amendment (cruel & unusual) question by holding that Kentucky is properly administering the drugs and therefore not causing the condemned undue pain.
Scalia, of course, would like us to return to the dark ages. From SCOTUSblog:
Justice Antonin Scalia, among the Court’s most conservative Justices, spoke out strenuously against any move to return the case for more evidence-gathering, suggesting that would only mean a continuing nationwide moratorium on executions with a resolution of the validity of the three-drug protocol put off; Scalia said “it could take years.” Scalia also was the one Justice who focused on a constitutional standard to apply to execution methods, saying that it is not a constitutional requirement that a state use “the method of execution that causes the least pain.” Those who wrote the Eighth Amendment, he said, were only concerned with punishment that amounted to actual torture, “the intentional infliction of pain….There is no painless requirement in there.”
So for the time being, it looks like the three-drug cocktail is likely to stick around, despite its defects. And we will continue to put down dogs more humanely than we execute humans.