The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/capital-punishment/)
The justices debated on Tuesday a constitutional way to execute Missourian Russell Bucklew, who has a rare medical condition. New Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioned the state’s attorney sharply.
The death row inmates filed suit after Tennessee carried out an execution by electric chair. Only three other states allow firing squads.
Edmund Zagorski, who killed two men more than three decades ago, wanted to avoid the fate of Billy Ray Irick, another inmate whose death by lethal injection Zagorski regarded as torture.
South Dakota has executed a man whose lawyers say was too intellectually disabled to be put to death constitutionally.
Edmund Zagorski asked to die by electrocution rather than a controversial lethal injection method that experts said causes several minutes of severe pain. A court ordered the state to comply.
The percentage has dipped below 50 percent for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 2000. The survey reports 49 percent of Americans say the death penalty is applied fairly, and 45 percent say it is applied unfairly.
The unanimous ruling made Washington the 20th state to abolish capital punishment. The last execution in the state was in 2010.
Three hours before Edmund Zagorski was scheduled to die, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam delayed his execution so the state could prepare to use the electric chair to kill him. The U.S. Supreme Court eliminated two other legal hurdles, making the execution likely to happen soon.
The Supreme Court still could allow Edmund Zagorski’s execution on Thursday but he has requested the electric chair, which the state rejected.
Although North Carolina hasn’t carried out an execution since 2006, more than 140 men and women remain on death row—and more than three-quarters of them were sentenced under penalty laws that have long since been abandoned in favor of reforms that de-emphasize capital punishment, according to an investigation by the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.