Lethal Injection Upheld

April 2008

On April 16, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of the most common form of execution, the three-drug lethal injection. The challenge in Baze v. Rees came from two Kentucky death row inmates who argued the method of legal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Of the 36 states with death penalty laws, 35 states use this method as well as the federal government.

The high court’s 7-2 majority decision held that the method of lethal injection was not shown to present an unconstitutional cruel risk of pain. "Simply because an execution method may result in pain, either by accident or an inescapable consequence of death, does not establish the sort of objectively intolerable risk of harm that qualifies as cruel and unusual," Chief Justice John Roberts stressed.

In a departure from recent decisions that tended to narrow the death penalty's application, the ruling upholds aspects of capital punishment that affect the states' ability to carry it out. Nationwide, approximately 3,300 inmates remain on death row. This decision is likely to lift the current unofficial moratorium on the death penalty that was initiated in September 2007 when the Court agreed to hear Baze.

For more information, contact Sarah Hammond in the Criminal Justice Program in Denver, Colorado, at (303) 364-7700; or jj-info@ncsl.org.