SCOTUS Watch: Glossip v. Gross

SCOTUS Watch

Glossip v. Gross, Docket No. 14-7955,

on Appeal from the Tenth Circuit

Introduction

“From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.  For more than twenty years I have endeavored—indeed.  I have struggled—along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor.  Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation is eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.”

-          Justice Harry Blackmun

In the current term of the United States Supreme Court, the Justices are set to decide a case which almost literally questions the “machinery of death” and the “death penalty experiment.”   

Recent Issues in Using Midzolam in Executions

In late July, the United States Supreme Court lifted a stay issued by the Ninth Circuit that required the State of Arizona to provide information about its lethal injection drug cocktail to inmate Joseph Rudolph Wood.  Mr. Wood was executed that same day.  His death was characterized by reporters as taking more than two hours and he took more than 600 gasps for air.  Most executions are complete in ten or eleven minutes.  Mr. Wood’s lengthy execution comes on the heels of another lengthy execution where Mr. Dennis McGuire took more than 20 minutes to die in Ohio, and also repeatedly convulsed and fought for breath after being injected.  An inmate in Oklahoma took more than a half an hour to die in his execution.