Supreme Court Upholds Lethal Injection
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Death Penalty, Kentucky, Law, Supreme Court
I am very anti-death penalty because any system that puts innocent people to death is simply broken and unethical.
However…if states feel they absolutely must have it, I think lethal injection is the most humane way to kill people…and the highest court in the land overwhelmingly agrees.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Kentucky’s method of putting criminals to death by lethal injection, not only clearing the way for Kentucky to resume executions but ending an unofficial moratorium in the 35 other states that have the death penalty.However, Justice John Paul Stevens, while concurring reluctantly with the judgment of the court, wrote that he now believed capital punishment itself is unconstitutional, and that Wednesday’s ruling might serve to reignite the debate over whether it should exist in the United States.
By 7 to 2, the court rejected challenges to the Kentucky execution procedure brought by two death-row inmates, holding that they had failed to show that the risks of pain from mistakes in an otherwise “humane lethal execution protocol†amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned by the Constitution.
The important distinction here is the idea that it’s cruel and unusual, not that the death penalty itself is unconstitutional.
SCOTUSblog and WSJ’s Law Blog have more.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 and is filed under Death Penalty, Kentucky, Law, Supreme Court. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 17th, 2008 at 12:13 am
ty for info…