Supreme Court denies execution by firing squad

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court refused Tuesday, over the vehement dissent of two justices, to let a death-row prisoner in Alabama choose a firing squad over a lethal injection cocktail that has caused several botched executions in recent years.

The court’s unsigned and unexplained denial represented the latest chapter in its running debate over the morality of the death penalty and the methods used to carry it out — a debate enlivened in 2015 when two justices said the time had come to decide whether capital punishment is constitutional.

At that time, the court ruled 5-4 that states could continue to use a controversial form of lethal injection that critics say can lead to severe pain and suffering, even if a sedative makes it impossible to tell whether the condemned prisoner can feel its effects. The court also said prisoners must identify a “known and available alternative” means of execution — something Justice Sonia Sotomayor called “a macabre challenge.”

That’s what Alabama’s Thomas Arthur did. Citing the risks identified from the use of the sedative midazolam, he asked that a firing squad carry out the execution that had been scheduled six times since he killed his girlfriend’s husband in 1982, only to be blocked by legal challenges.

But a federal appeals court ruled — and the Supreme Court apparently agreed — that Arthur failed to prove the lethal injection would be painful.

Sotomayor, joined by Justice Stephen Breyer — the court’s leading critic of the death penalty — wrote a blistering 18-page dissent in which she said states can now “immunize their methods of execution, no matter how cruel or how unusual, from judicial review.”