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Lethal injection review may halt executions in U.S.

America, which has some 3,350 prisoners on death row, on Friday seemed to be moving towards an unofficial moratorium on executions after the Supreme Court granted a rare last-minute reprieve to a condemned man in Texas.

The Court stay for Carlton Turner Jr, scheduled to be put to death by injection for killing his adoptive parents, arrived hours after a death row inmate in Alabama was granted a 45-day reprieve by the State’s Governor. Opponents of the death penalty said the moves suggested there would be a lull in executions while the Supreme Court reviewed lethal injection, the method for dispatching prisoners in all but one of the 38 States that impose the death penalty.

“I think this is a sign that maybe all executions are going to be put on hold aside from those who might volunteer, or who don’t raise the issue of the lethal injection method,” said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Centre.

In its order on Thursday the Supreme Court offered no explanation for Turner’s reprieve. However, his lawyers had based their appeal entirely on likening lethal injection to a “chemical straitjacket.”

The court is expected to hear arguments next January on whether lethal injection, a cocktail of three drugs, represents cruel and unusual punishment and is therefore unlawful. The challenge is on behalf of two condemned men in Kentucky, Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr, who argued in their 2004 suit that they would suffer excruciating pain in the moments before death, but would be unable to cry out because of the immobilising effects of one of the drugs in the injection.

The Supreme Court’s consideration also follows a number of botched executions. Its decision, expected by June 2008, will have broad implications. Most of the 37 States using lethal injection use the same drugs as in Kentucky. In recent months 11 States have suspended executions due to concerns over the cruelty of lethal injection. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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