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TERRE HAUTE, Indiana: The United States Supreme Court on Thursday night (January 14) rejected a lower court ruling that the last two scheduled federal executions of President Donald Trump’s administration be delayed to allow the men convicts recover from COVID-19.
The court’s conservative majority ruling meant that Corey Johnson, a convicted murderer, will be tied to a stretcher in the execution chamber of the United States Department of Justice in Terre Haute, Indiana, shortly after Thursday night to be injected with lethal doses. of pentobarbital.
The Justice Department has scheduled the execution of Dustin Higgs, convicted of another murder, for Friday night. His attorneys are also challenging his execution on other legal grounds in addition to his COVID-19 diagnosis, but so far the Supreme Court has allowed all executions to proceed since Trump resumed the practice last year after a 17-year hiatus.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered that the executions be postponed until at least March 16 to allow the convicted men to recover, and sided with medical experts who said that their coronavirus-damaged lungs would cause undue suffering if they received lethal injections. This would violate the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution that prohibits “cruel and unusual” punishments, the lawyers argued.
A divided panel of judges at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned Chutkan’s suspension 2-1.
“The Eighth Amendment ‘does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death, something that, of course, is not guaranteed for many people,'” the opinion said, citing a Supreme Court precedent.
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Trump, a Republican and longtime defender of capital punishment, oversaw the resumption of federal executions last summer after a 17-year hiatus as the coronavirus spread. Those sentenced to death, at least two of their lawyers, other inmates and several members of the prison and execution staff have fallen ill with COVID-19.
President-elect Joe Biden, a Democrat, will take office next Wednesday and says he will seek to abolish the death penalty.
Higgs was convicted of overseeing the abduction and murder of three women at the Patuxent Research Shelter in Maryland in 1996. He did not kill anyone himself, which his lawyers have argued is grounds for clemency.
Johnson was convicted of murdering seven people in Virginia in 1992 as part of a drug trafficking ring. His lawyers say he has an intellectual disability which means it would be unconstitutional to execute him.
They have said that the IQ score of 77 that was presented in his 1993 trial was incorrect, and his actual IQ is even lower, within the range of 70 to 75 thresholds that courts have used to determine intellectual disability.
Hours before his scheduled execution, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit denied his attorneys’ request for a new hearing on the complaint that Johnson has an intellectual disability too severe to be executed, given that Federal Law The Death Penalty prohibits the execution of someone deemed “mentally retarded.”
Appellate Court Judge James Wynn disagreed with the majority, saying new evidence shows Johnson’s IQ is below 77.
“But no court has considered such evidence,” Wynn wrote. “If Johnson’s death sentence is executed today, the United States will execute a person with an intellectual disability, which is unconstitutional.”
The Supreme Court also rejected a request by Johnson’s lawyers to delay the execution on these grounds.
Johnson’s spiritual advisor, Bill Breeden, visited Johnson for several hours on Thursday and said he was still coughing and listless as a result of the coronavirus and that he expressed remorse for his crimes. Breeden described Johnson’s writing level as that of a third grade scholar.
Attorneys for both men, citing medical experts who testified in court, say the damaged lung tissue would rupture faster than usual after they were administered lethal doses of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate.
There could be a period of several minutes in which the men experience drowning as their lungs fill with bloody fluids, a pulmonary edema, before the drug drives them insane or kills them, lawyers argued, calling it a form of torture.
