The Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to decide when Death Row inmates may challenge lethal injection as a method of capital punishment, in a surprise decision issued after the justices stopped the execution of a Florida prisoner who was already strapped to a gurney.
The court stayed the execution of Clarence Hill, 48, convicted of murdering a Pensacola police officer in 1982, and said it would hear his claim that he should have a chance to argue that his civil rights would be violated because the chemicals used to execute him would cause excessive pain.
It is a claim that has been pressed with growing frequency by defense lawyers in recent years, but it has generally not yet succeeded either in lower courts or at the Supreme Court.
Thirty-seven of the 38 death penalty states use lethal injection, as do the military and the federal government. Because the chemical mixtures in all jurisdictions are similar to those used in Florida, a victory for Hill at the Supreme Court could tie up the death penalty across the county in litigation, at least temporarily, legal analysts said.
“It certainly could be a mess,” said Douglas Berman, a professor of law at Ohio State University who specializes in criminal law. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, at least 25 inmates are scheduled for execution before the end of June, when the court probably would rule.
The Hill case does not ask the court to rule directly on the constitutionality of lethal injection. Rather, it raises a procedural problem: what recourse there should be for a prisoner who finds out at or near the last minute that the method by which the state proposes to execute him might be “cruel and unusual” punishment.
Hill tried to persuade the 11th U.S. Court of Appeals, based in Atlanta, to give him a day in court. The 11th Circuit dismissed Hill’s appeal, and he was sent to his death as scheduled at 6 p.m. Tuesday evening. But the Supreme Court intervened, setting oral argument in the case for April 26.
