The Supreme Court ruled Thursday in favor of allowing a Georgia death row inmate to alter his execution method from lethal injection to firing squad.
In a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Elena Kagan, the high court ruled that inmate Michael Nance’s medical aversion to the use of lethal injection is well within his constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment, which prevents cruel and unusual punishment.
“A prisoner must identify a readily available alternative method of execution that would significantly reduce the risk of severe pain. In doing so, the prisoner is not confined to proposing a method authorized by the executing State’s law; he may instead ask for a method used in other States,” Kagan wrote.
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Nance was sentenced to death in 2002 after he fatally shot a bystander during a bank robbery. He said the sedative injection used for death row inmates would cause an adverse reaction to his back pain medicine and could cause his “severely compromised veins” to “blow” during the execution, according to court records.
The inmate also said such an adverse reaction could lead “to the leakage of the lethal injection drug into the surrounding tissue,” which prompted him to file an injunction under a federal civil rights statute seeking to bar Georgia from killing through injection.
Despite winning in court Thursday, Nance’s primary problem that led him to litigation was that Georgia is not one of the four states that legally allow firing squads for death row inmates. That is, in part, what led Justice Amy Coney Barrett to lead a dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.
“The Court is looking too far down the road,” Barrett wrote, adding, “In my view, the consequence of the relief that a prisoner seeks depends on state law as it currently exists.”
“And under existing state law, there is no question that Nance’s challenge necessarily implies the invalidity of his lethal injection sentence: He seeks to prevent the State from executing him in the only way it lawfully can,” Barrett added.
Her dissent reflects how lower courts initially treated Nance’s efforts. Notably, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit dismissed his plea, saying his claims were an attempt to have his death sentence tossed because Georgia only practices lethal injection methods.
But Kagan maintained her sincere approach to Nance’s claims in her majority opinion, saying, “The substance of the claim, now more than ever, thus points toward” Solem v. Helm, the 1983 high court opinion that held that a sentence may not be disproportionate to the crime committed.
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The Supreme Court later added in 1991’s Harmelin v. Michigan that a disproportionate sentence could violate the Eighth Amendment.
“The prisoner is not challenging the death sentence itself; he is taking the validity of that sentence as a given. And he is providing the State with a veritable blueprint for carrying the death sentence out,” Kagan wrote.
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