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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMissouri Executes Man While His Appeal Was Still Pending Before Supreme Court
Herbert Smulls was in the middle of a phone call discussing his attorneys final efforts to save his life when he was reportedly seized by prison guards, hauled into an execution chamber, and injected with a toxic cocktail of drugs. At the time of his death, an appeal was pending before the United States Supreme Court asking the justices to halt his execution. Andrew Cohen lays out the timeline:At 10:11, the final lethal injection protocols were initiated. By this time, the 8th Circuit had rejected all of the claims before itover another pointed dissent from Judge Byeleaving only an active appeal before the Supreme Court. At 10:20 Smulls was pronounced dead. Ten minutes later, at 10:30, the Supreme Court notified the lawyers that Smulls final stay request had been denied at 10:24. This means that Missouri began to execute a man 13 minutes before it was entirely sure it could do so. Smulls was pronounced dead four minutes before the Supreme Court finally authorized Missouri to kill him.
As Cohen notes, [j]ust imagine what wed be talking about today if the justices had granted Smulls stay request four minutes after he was pronounced dead. At the very least, Smulls appeal held enough merit that a United States Court of Appeals judge would have granted the stay.
And yet, thanks to a 1983 Supreme Court ruling, Missouris actions were probably legal. The state points to Barefoot v. Estelle, which explained that [s]tays of execution are not automatic pending the filing and consideration of a petition for a writ of certiorari from this Court to the court of appeals that has denied a writ of habeas corpus, to justify its actions in the Smulls case.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/02/02/3237571/missouri-executes-man-appeal-pending-supreme-court/
spanone
(135,851 posts)kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)Somebody needs to spend the rest of their own life in jail for that.
FBaggins
(26,749 posts)If any of the justices thought there was any chance of the appeal succeeding... they would have granted a temporary stay off execution.
F4lconF16
(3,747 posts)While I do think there are people who don't deserve life after what they've done, and as much as I sometimes wish I believed in a hell so we can send them to it, we just can't know. We never can. The number of improperly tried cases, the number of screwups, the number of falsely imprisoned people, all of that speaks to why the death penalty needs to be abolished. I for one am surprised it hasn't happened already (though I guess I probably shouldn't be).
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)"Smulls was pronounced dead four minutes before the Supreme Court finally authorized Missouri to kill him."
From the rest of the article, it sounds to me as though this is probably false, and what actually happened was that Smulls was pronounced dead four minutes before the Supreme Court passed up on an opportunity to revoke the valid authorisation to kill him that Missouri had at the time it did so.
There are a number of good reasons to oppose the death penalty, and to be alarmed about states trying to preempt the results of appeals, but I'm slightly suspicious of presenting this as unauthorised.
FBaggins
(26,749 posts)The USSC does not "authorize" death sentences (which implies that nobody can be executed until they say so).