“Yet since then, he has managed to secure delay through lawsuit after lawsuit,” Gorsuch wrote, echoing a view often expressed by death penalty advocates.įellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito said in 2015 that the legal challenge to Oklahoma’s method of execution case was part of a “guerilla war” against the death penalty.īucklew was convicted of the 1996 murder in southeastern Missouri of Michael Sanders, who was living with Bucklew’s former girlfriend Stephanie Ray at the time. Gorsuch, appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017, noted that Bucklew is awaiting execution for crimes committed more than two decades ago. There also was no evidence that his chosen alternative, lethal gas, would be less painful, it concluded. In that case, the court held that inmates challenging a method of execution must come up with an alternative option that was less painful.īucklew failed to show that lethal gas could be “readily implemented” as required under Supreme Court precedent, the court ruled. Monday’s ruling was in line with a 2015 decision in which the court rejected a challenge to Oklahoma’s method of execution by lethal injection. “With today’s ruling we are one step closer to justice.”īucklew’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “The state of Missouri and the victims of Russell Bucklew’s crimes have waited 23 long years for this just and lawful sentence to be carried out,” said a spokesman for Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican. Referring to the history of capital punishment, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court’s majority that “the Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death - something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.” The court’s five conservatives were in the majority and its four liberals dissented. In a decision that exposed stark divisions among the justices on the death penalty, the court ruled 5-4 that Bucklew had failed to present enough evidence to pursue his request to be executed by lethal gas.
Russell Bucklew, 50, had argued that lethal injection might inflict undue agony by rupturing blood-filled tumors on his face, head, neck and throat caused by a congenital condition called cavernous hemangioma in violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment. Supreme Court is pictured in Washington, U.S., March 18, 2019.
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