WASHINGTON (AP) — No U.S. Supreme Court justice has emerged as a principled opponent of the death penalty, even as the number of executions annually in the country 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 one on the Supreme Court objected publicly when the justices voted to let proceed with the execution of Joseph Wood, who unsuccessfully sought information about the drugs that would be used to kill him. Inmates in and 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.
"They're all voting to kill them, every so often. They do it in a very workmanlike, technocratic fashion," , a veteran death penalty lawyer in , said of the high court.
Wood's execution on July 23 was the 26th in the United States this year and the third in which prisoners took much longer than usual to die. Wood, convicted of killing his estranged girlfriend 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 said she and her colleagues are aware of what happened in , 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 .
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"They're all voting to kill them, every so often. They do it in a very workmanlike, technocratic fashion," , a veteran death penalty lawyer in , said of the high court.
Wood's execution on July 23 was the 26th in the United States this year and the third in which prisoners took much longer than usual to die. Wood, convicted of killing his estranged girlfriend 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 said she and her colleagues are aware of what happened in , 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 .
continue to read here
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