Supreme Court justices silent over execution drug secrecy

WASHINGTON — No one on the Supreme Court objected publicly when the justices voted to let Arizona proceed with the execution of Joseph Wood, who unsuccessfully sought information about the drugs that would be used to kill him.

Inmates in Florida and Missouri went to their deaths by lethal injection in the preceding weeks after the high court refused to block their executions. Again, no justice said the executions should be stopped.

Even as the number of executions annually has dropped by more than half over the past 15 years and the court has barred states from killing juveniles and the mentally disabled, no justice has emerged as a principled opponent of the death penalty.

This court differs from some of its predecessors. Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall dissented every time their colleagues ruled against death row inmates, and Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, near the end of their long careers, came to view capital punishment as unconstitutional.

“They’re all voting to kill them, every so often. They do it in a very workmanlike, technocratic fashion,” Stephen Bright, a veteran death penalty lawyer in Georgia, said of the current court.

Wood’s execution on July 23 was the 26th in the United States this year and the third in which prisoners took much longer than usual to die. Wood, convicted of killing his estranged girlfriend and her father, was pronounced dead nearly two hours after his execution began, and an Associated Press reporter was among witnesses who said Wood appeared to gasp repeatedly, hundreds of times in all, before he died.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she and her colleagues are aware of what happened in Arizona, though she declined to say how the court would rule on a plea to stop the next scheduled execution — of Michael Worthington on Wednesday in Missouri.

“Your crystal ball is as good as mine,” she said last week in an interview with The Associated Press.

The court’s rejection of Wood’s claim that he was entitled to learn more about Arizona’s procedures and the source of the execution drugs came at the end of protracted legal wrangling. A federal judge in Arizona initially denied Wood’s claim. The federal appeals court in San Francisco then granted a reprieve. But the justices reversed that ruling in a brief order.

In death cases, the court often is the last stop for inmates seeking a last-minute reprieve. They rarely succeed, a function of the need for five votes on the nine-justice court and the reluctance of appellate judges to disturb lower court rulings unless they are demonstrably wrong.

Ginsburg cautioned not to read too much into the absence of public dissent when the court rejects 11th-hour appeals to stop executions. “When a stay is denied, it doesn’t mean we are in fact unanimous,” she said.