Just one day before his planned execution, Richard Glossip and two other prisons have received stays of execution.
The Supreme Court halted the executions Wednesday pending a decision on the prisoners’ case in the Supreme Court. Glossip was to be executed Thursday evening, while the other two were scheduled for February and March.
The court agreed this week to consider the constitutional implications of the drug midazolam, one of three drugs used in Oklahoma’s lethal injection cocktail. Unless an approved drug is found to replace midazolam, for now the three executions will not take place. The court did, however, allow the execution of Warren Lee Hill to proceed in Georgia, with a different injection cocktail, despite his lawyers’ argument that he is intellectually disabled.
Midazolam has been involved in several botched executions, including that of Clayton Lockett, who awoke ten minutes into his execution groaning in pain.
Only one week ago, the court rejected an appeal from another Oklahoma prisoner, Charles Warner. He was given the lethal injection containing midazolam, and told the room, “It feels like acid” and “My body is on fire.”
In her dissenting opinion in the decision not to stay Warner’s execution, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed concern that midazolam may not satisfy the Eight Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment: “Petitioners have committed horrific crimes and should be punished. But the Eighth Amendment guarantees that no one should be subjected to an execution that causes searing, unnecessary pain before death.”
The Supreme Court has not considered a death penalty case since 2008, when they ruled that lethal injections were humane as long as they contained an anesthetic like sodium thiopental. But since then, sodium thiopental has essentially been yanked off the market by manufacturers protesting its use for the death penalty, and midazolam became its controversial replacement.
Glossip, on death row for hiring someone to murder his boss, is spiritually advised by the well-known activist nun Sister Helen Prejean. She believes he is innocent and has promised to be at his side in the execution chamber, should it come to that.
“There is no humane way to kill a conscious, imaginative human being,” Prejean said Tuesday. “We the citizens have our name on that gurney.”
