WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US Supreme Court Wednesday ruled that lethal injection was constitutional, in a landmark ruling set to pave the way for executions to resume in the country after a hiatus of over six months.
The judges ruled by a 7 to 2 vote that the risk of suffering to those executed by lethal injection did not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment," which is barred under the US Constitution.
Capital punishment is constitutional," said Chief Justice John Roberts who wrote the majority opinion, "so there must be a means of implementing it."
The seven justices were markedly split in their reasons for accepting lethal injection however, all but ensuring that more challenges to the death penalty generally and to lethal injection will make their way through the court system in the future.
Several death row inmates, led by a pair from Kentucky, had urged the Supreme Court to rule on whether lethal injection, the most commonly used form of execution across the United States, violated the constitution.
They had argued that the three-part injection method common in the United States, in which a first shot sedates the inmate, a second paralyzes the muscles and a third stops the heart, caused needless suffering in some cases.
If the execution goes according to plan, the inmate quickly loses consciousness and dies in a few minutes. But if the anesthesia is not properly administered, the inmate can suffer immensely.
In a December 2006 execution, convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz had to be given two lethal doses after a needle missed his vein and pierced tissue instead. Grimacing as he struggled to breathe, his execution took 34 minutes.
After the Supreme Court agreed in September 2007 to hear the case, executions were put on hold across the country -- keeping the year's total at 42, compared with 53 executed in 2006, and the peak of 98 in 1999.
In Wednesday's Supreme Court decision, Justice John Paul Stevens, who sided with the majority, said that the internal division among justices on the matter makes future legal challenges all but inevitable.
"Instead of ending the controversy, I am now convinced that this case will generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol ... but also about the justification for the death penalty itself," he wrote in his opinion.
Meanwhile, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg -- one of just two justices to part ways with the majority -- said she was not convinced that lethal injection avoided needless suffering.
"Rare though errors may be, the consequences of a mistake about the condemned inmate's consciousness are horrendous and effectively undetectable," she wrote, saying that, at a minimum, other lethal injection procedures should be pursued.
"If readily available measures can materially increase the likelihood that the protocol will cause no pain, a state fails to adhere to contemporary standards of decency if it declines to employ those methods," Ginsberg wrote in her dissent, in which she was joined by Justice David Souter.
The executive director for Amnesty International USA, meanwhile, said the high court ruling did not address the broader question of whether capital punishment should be outlawed for reasons of social justice and equity.
"Ultimately, the preoccupation with lethal injection is nothing more than a distraction from the myriad problems currently plaguing the death penalty system," said Larry Cox of Amnesty.
"Incompetent counsel, prosecutorial misconduct and racial, class and geographic bias are just the tip of the iceberg in a system that is flawed at its very core," he said, calling for the death penalty to be repealed.
Around two-thirds of Americans favor the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, in a country where 3,260 detainees are presently on death row.
In an unrelated case Wednesday, the US high court also heard arguments on whether the rape of a child is punishable by death -- a sanction which over the past 30 years has been carried out in the United States exclusively in murder convictions.
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