The Supreme Court could avoid cases like this one if Americans abolished the damn death penalty

Rss@dailykos.com (meteor Blades)
Thursday, January 29, 2015, 12:49 pm
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday has stayed the execution of three Oklahoma inmates until it rules on whether the use of the sedative midazolam as part of the three-drug combination that would be used to kill them constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The Court had agreed to take on the cruel-and-unusual case last Friday.
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Too late for Charles Warner, the murderer who Oklahoma executed Jan. 15 after the Court refused to grant him a stay in a 5-4 ruling. Justice Sonia Sottomayor delivered a vigorous dissent in that decision. Warner and the three men whose executions have been stayed were each convicted of murder.
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Someday, perhaps, 32 states (and the federal government) will wise up and join the 18 states plus the District of Columbia that have abolished the death penalty. Until then, we're going to continue to have executions of the innocent, even if most of these cases don't get examined in the detail that Carlos de Luna's did.
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