National News
Mark Sherman,
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) —
No one on the Supreme
Court objected publicly
when the justices voted to
let Arizona proceed with the
execution of Joseph Wood,
who unsuccessfully sought
information about the drugs
that would be used to kill
him.
Inmates in Florida and
Missouri went to their
deaths by lethal injection in
the preceding weeks after
the high court refused to
block their executions.
Again, no justice said the
executions
should
be
stopped.
Even as the number of
executions annually has
dropped by more than half
over the past 15 years and
the court has barred states
from killing juveniles and
the mentally disabled, no
entitled to learn more about
Arizona’s procedures and
the source of the execution
drugs came at the end of
protracted legal wrangling.
A federal judge in Arizona
initially denied Wood’s
claim. The federal appeals
court in San Francisco then
granted a reprieve. But the
justices reversed that ruling
in a brief order. The court
said the judge who initially
ruled against Wood “did not
abuse his discretion.”
In death cases, the court
often is the last stop for
inmates seeking a last-
minute reprieve. They
rarely succeed, a function of
the need for five votes on
the nine-justice court and
the reluctance of appellate
judges to disturb lower
court rulings unless they are
demonstrably wrong.
The substance of capital
punishment issues usually
finds its way in front of the
counsel of the NAACP
Legal Defense and Educa-
tional
Fund.
“My
assumption is quite a lot is
happening behind the
scenes.”
Ginsburg cautioned not to
read too much into the
absence of public dissent
when the court rejects 11th-
hour appeals to stop
executions. “When a stay is
denied, it doesn’t mean we
are in fact unanimous,” she
said.
Still, Ifill said the court’s
unwillingness so far to deal
with states’ reluctance to
reveal much about the
provenance of lethal injec-
tion drugs is troubling.
“I’m disappointed after all
the revelations that at least
some justices weren’t pre-
pared to say something
pretty strong,” she said.
In 1972, the court struck
down existing death penalty
laws across the country but
‘The court’s unwillingness so far to deal with
states’ reluctance to reveal much about the
provenance of lethal injection drugs is troubling’
justice has emerged as a
principled opponent of the
death penalty.
This court differs from
some of its predecessors.
Justices William Brennan
and Thurgood Marshall dis-
sented every time their
colleagues ruled against
death row inmates, and Jus-
tices Harry Blackmun and
John Paul Stevens, near the
end of their long careers,
came to view capital pun-
ishment as unconstitutional.
“They’re all voting to kill
them, every so often. They
do it in a very workmanlike,
technocratic
fashion,”
Stephen Bright, a veteran
death penalty lawyer in
Georgia, said of the current
court.
Wood’s execution on July
23 was the 26th in the Unit-
ed States this year and the
third in which prisoners
took much longer than usual
to die. Wood, convicted of
killing his estranged girl-
friend and her father, was
pronounced dead nearly two
hours after his execution
began, and an Associated
Press reporter was among
witnesses who said Wood
appeared to gasp repeatedly,
hundreds of times in all,
before he died.
Justice Ruth Bader Gins-
burg said she and her
colleagues are aware of
what happened in Arizona,
though she declined to say
how the court would rule on
a plea to stop the next
scheduled execution — of
Michael Worthington on
Wednesday in Missouri.
“Your crystal ball is as
good as mine,” she said last
week in an interview with
The Associated Press.
The court’s rejection of
Wood’s claim that he was
justices when there is no
time pressure. In January,
the court heard arguments in
a case over a Florida law
that used a rigid threshold in
intelligence test scores in
cases of borderline mental
disability.
In late May, a five-justice
majority led by Anthony
Kennedy struck down the
law because it “contravenes
our nation’s commitment to
dignity.”
The soaring language that
Kennedy often favors in his
opinions has led some death
penalty experts to believe
that he eventually will pro-
vide the fifth vote, along
with those of the court’s
four liberal justices, to end
or severely restrict the use
of the death penalty.
“It is impossible to recon-
cile that language with the
secrecy surrounding lethal
injections,” said Sherrilyn
Ifill, president and director-
did not declare capital pun-
ishment unconstitutional.
Four years later, the justices
approved several rewritten
state laws, and executions
soon resumed.
Since then, 1,385 inmates
have been executed in 34
states. But more than a third
of those were in Texas
alone, and in recent years,
only a handful of other
states have carried out exe-
cutions on a somewhat
regular basis, among them
Arizona, Florida, Georgia,
Missouri, Ohio and Oklaho-
ma.
The number of death
penalty prosecutions also
has been dropping, in large
part because of the avail-
ability of lifetime prison
sentences with no possibili-
ty of parole.
With the number of exe-
cutions below 50 each year
beginning in 2010, the
chances of being put to
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(AP PHOTO)
Supreme Court Silent Over Execution Drug Secrecy
John Zemblidge, right, of Phoenix, leads a group of about a dozen death
penalty opponents in prayer as they protest the possible execution of Joseph
Rudolph Wood at the state prison in Florence, Ariz. on Wednesday, July 23,
2014. Arizona’s highest court on Wednesday temporarily halted the execution
of the condemned inmate so it could consider a last-minute appeal. The
Arizona Supreme Court said it would consider whether he received inadequate
legal representation at his sentencing. The appeal also challenges the secrecy
of the lethal injection process and the drugs that are used.
death for killing someone is
akin to being struck by
lightning, said University of
North Carolina political sci-
entist Frank Baumgartner.
“It is hard to argue that the
death penalty is much of a
deterrent when we’re hav-
ing 15,000 to 20,000 homi-
cides a year and 30 to 40
executions. The likelihood
of being executed is so low
that it calls into question the
purpose of it,” Baumgartner
said.
So far, however, the
Supreme Court continues to
allow death sentences to be
carried out despite problems
with execution drugs and a
rising number of exonera-
tions through the use of
DNA evidence.
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