Justices Hear Arguments in Lethal Injection Case

Source: New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday heard starkly different descriptions of Kentucky’s method of putting people to death, with a lawyer for a condemned prisoner asserting there is an unacceptable risk of agony and a lawyer for the state saying nothing could be further from the truth.

“The risk here is real,” Donald Verrilli, the lawyer for Ralph Baze, the death-row inmate, told the justices, noting that the three-drug protocol that Kentucky uses in executions is illegal for euthanizing animals.
Mr. Verrilli argued that there are too many things that can go wrong in Kentucky executions, largely because poorly trained people are carrying them out, creating too much risk that a prisoner will die in great pain even though he is unable to cry out.

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Justice Antonin Scalia noted that execution methods that have fallen out of use — the electric chair, the firing squad, the hangman’s noose — have been abandoned in part because of fears that they were not pain-free.

But where is it written that the state must choose “the least painful method,” Justice Scalia demanded. “Is that somewhere in the Constitution?”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/washington/07cnd-scotus.html

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Scalia is one individual who should be impeached.

He does not deserve to be called "Justice" :grr: :puke:

Gee Tony, since lethal injection wasn't available as a method of execution at the time of ratification, how could it be covered by the Constitution? It must be prima facie cruel and unusual, wouldn't you think?

Not justice.

Tony distracts and avoids the truth.