By Rose Carmen Goldberg* “Welcome to Groundhog Day,” as former Justice Scalia once said. The scene is familiar. This month, yet another pharmaceutical company has voiced opposition to use of its drugs in executions. In a public statement, pharmaceutical juggernaut Pfizer announced it will not supply drugs for lethal injections, and will enforce strict distribution restrictions to this end. Yet the scene is also different. Though many pharmaceutical companies have spoken out against the death …
The Fallibility of Finality
By Michael Admirand and G. Ben Cohen * “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.” [1] Justice Robert Jackson’s famous quote pinpoints the consequences of final judgments in the United States Supreme Court. These consequences are most devastating in the arena of capital punishment, where denial of certiorari or deference to a state is a death sentence. Last year, twenty-seven people were executed after the Court refused to hear further …
SCOTUS Invites Death Row to BYOE (Bring Your Own Executioner)
By Charles McGonigal The death penalty is the government’s deepest moral quagmire. An execution is irrevocable and heavily resembles the crimes that it punishes. To make peace with this decision, society deploys resources to try to avoid executing innocents (due process, defense counsel, mandatory appeals) and to distinguish it from homicide. One of the most important differentiators has been to make the execution as humane as possible, embodied in the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel …
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Clinging to Capital Punishment
By Lisa Ebersole Last week the Utah state legislature passed a law that would reinstitute death by firing squad as an option for capital punishment if the state were unable to maintain adequate supplies of lethal injection drugs. Many are skeptical of this seemingly barbaric and primitive method of execution—in a recent poll only 12 percent of respondents said that they would support this type of substitution. Some contend, however, that death by firing squad is actually the quickest (and …