This lengthy local article, headlined "'I hate you': Inside the execution chamber as Alabama cop-killer put to death," provides an extended account of the lethal injection process to complete the sentence given to Torrey McNabb for murdering a police officer back in 1997. The folks at the Death Penalty Information Center suggest in this posting that the execution is significant because of how long the lethal injection process took. In contrast, as evidenced by posts here and here, Kent Scheidegger at Crime & Consequences instead found significant the willingness of the Supreme Court to vacate lower court stays concerning executions protocols to ensure this execution went forward.
I have put a question mark in the title of this post because I am not sure any individual executions or individual stay ruling are really all that significant in the long-running litigious lethal injection wars. Some lower court judges still seem inclined to find problems in nearly every possible state lethal injection plan, while a majority of the Supreme Court Justices seem now content that the latest standard approaches states have been adopting are sufficient for constitutional purposes. This leads me to predict continued lower-court legal wrangling that gums up the works of the machinery of death, but still allows a few states to complete an execution or two every so often.
Notably, this DPIC review of yearly executions indicates that this latest Alabama execution was the 21st of 2017, meaning this year already represents an uptick in execution compared to 2016. But it also means that we are still on pace this year to have the second or maybe third fewest years executions in a quarter century.
Comments
Post a Comment