Raymond Bucklew may deserve to die for the violent crimes he committed 30 years ago as his girlfriend was breaking up with him. But he does not deserve to die a torturous death as the state of Missouri carries out the legally upheld death sentence.
The Supreme Court has just used Bucklew's case, however, to open the door to executions in the future that will mock the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishments." The 5-4 majority in Bucklew v. Precythe has apparently adopted a legal rule previously crafted only by Justice Clarence Thomas that the state can use a method of execution with a substantial risk of severe pain during the procedure as long as the state does not deliberately intend to inflict unnecessary pain.
Bucklew's case drew only limited attention as he argued through three levels of federal courts over the past five years that he has a rare medical condition that will result in severe pain as he lies dying during a lethal injection. But Justice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion turned the medical oddity of Bucklew's case into an invitation for gruesome deaths for condemned inmates in the future.
Bucklew has a rare medical condition — technically, cavernous hemangioma — characterized by the formation of huge clumps of blood vessels in his head, neck, throat, and airway. That condition, he argued on the basis of detailed medical evidence presented in a federal court trial, would interfere with the sedative used in a lethal injection and in effect would cause him to suffocate to death on his own blood.
"[T]he Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death . . . ," Gorsuch wrote in a critical part of the 31-page opinion rejecting Bucklew's claim. Gorsuch pivoted from that unremarkable statement to quote Thomas's passages from two prior decisions that would disapprove of only those methods of execution that "superadd terror, pain, or disgrace" in carrying out the death sentence.
Thomas wrote that passage for the first time in an opinion joined by only one other justice, the late justice Antonin Scalia, in rejecting a Kentucky inmate's Eighth Amendment challenge to the state's three-drug lethal injection protocol. Chief Justice John Roberts' plurality opinion in Baze v. Rees (2008) set out a different test that death row inmates can challenge a method of execution if it carries a substantial risk of severe pain during the procedure.
Gorsuch in effect incorporated Thomas's test, which garnered only two votes, on the ground that those two votes were necessary for the majority result in Baze. It was, as Slate's Supreme Court correspondent Mark Joseph Stern called it in a critical article, a remarkable "sleight of hand." Worse, it amounted to jurisprudential alchemy by converting a minority view into supposedly authoritative precedent.
"Neil Gorsuch Just Made Death Worse," was the headline on a strongly argued critique
that Elie Mystal, managing editor of the legal affairs blog AbovetheLaw, wrote for The Nation. "In an appalling majority opinion," the deck headline added, "Gorsuch endorses pain-filled deaths for people subjected to capital punishment."
Under Baze, an inmate challenging a method of execution must offer a "feasible and readily implemented alternative method" that would reduce the risk of severe pain. Bucklew complied with that bizarre requirement by proposing lethal nitrogen gas; the state's lawyers answered that nitrogen gas is an untested method that no state has adopted.
Gorsuch, it will be recalled, faced his most difficult hurdle in his Senate confirmation hearing in April 2018 for his lack of sympathy to the "frozen trucker" who was fired for driving his cab with inoperable heater to a place where he could escape from subfreezing temperatures. Thus, it is no surprise that Gorsuch had no sympathy for Bucklew, who shot and killed his girlfriend's male companion and then abducted her at gunpoint and raped her at a distant location.
Gorsuch found Bucklew's evidence on the risks of Missouri's planned lethal injection too weak to avoid summary judgment at the trial level in the state's favor. Writing for the four liberal dissenters, Justice Stephen G. Breyer argued correctly butto no avail that Bucklew had "easily established a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether an execution by lethal injection would subject him to impermissible suffering."
Not content with condemning Bucklew to a painful death, Gorsuch went on to criticize as well the cumbersome and treacherous procedures that death penalty lawyers must master and navigate to try to ensure that capital punishment is carried out, if at all, reliably and fairly. In truth, it is not, as seen in the scores of death sentences reversed over the past two decades and in the skewed racial and ethnic demographics of death rows nationwide.
Judges, Gorsuch wrote in closing, should ensure that death penalty challenges are "resolved fairly and expeditiously" and should "police carefully against attempts to use such challenges as tools to interpose unjustified delay." Justice Sonia Sotomayor aptly chided Gorsuch for adding "inessential" dicta to an already contentious decision.
"There are higher values than ensuring that executions run on time," Sotomayor wrote. "If a death sentence or the manner in which it is carried out violates the Constitution, that stain can never come out. Our jurisprudence must remain one of vigilance and care, not one of dismissiveness."
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