STUPID TECHNICALITY HOLDS UP JUSTICE

The lethal injection would be "cruel and unusual"!

Clarence Hill was strapped onto a gurney in the death chamber at Florida’s state prison at 5pm on Tuesday. Intravenous tubes were inserted into his veins to administer a lethal cocktail of drugs. Witnesses silently had taken their seats in the adjacent room from where they planned to watch Hill, 48, die at 6pm. But the brown curtain separating them from the man who killed a police officer, Stephen Taylor, in a botched bank robbery 23 years ago, remained drawn. At 6.36pm — more than half an hour after the execution had been scheduled to take place — Randall Polk, the prison’s assistant warden, announced that there had been a last-minute stay of execution. The witnesses, including members of Florida’s senate and relatives of Mr Taylor, were led back out.

The prison had received a message from Justice Anthony Kennedy, of the US Supreme Court, ordering a temporary reprieve. Although lower courts had rejected Hill’s final appeals, his lawyer filed a petition at 4.45pm which was, in the words of one anti-death penalty campaigner yesterday, “smart enough” to make Justice Kennedy think twice. On Wednesday, the stay was confirmed by the full Supreme Court. It decided to hear arguments that Hill should be allowed to pursue a claim against lethal injection based on the violation of his constitutional rights protecting him from cruel or unusual punishment. The case may take several months to wind its way through the courts. But in the meantime, lawyers representing some of the 22 death row prisoners due to be executed in the next four months, are preparing similar appeals....

Hill’s stay of execution relied upon new research published in the Lancet medical journal in Britain last April. Dr David Lubarsky, a conservative republican who says that he holds no brief for the abolitionists, had studied toxicology reports on 49 executed prisoners and found that many of them did not have sufficient levels of a particular anaesthetic — thiopental — to prevent suffering. Hill’s lawyer said that it was a fantastic day, but Linda Knouse, the sister of Hill’s victim, said that her family was numb. “It’s devastating because we really thought this chapter was going to be closed for us, and now it seems to go and on and on.”

Report here



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