It was a pretty clever argument for the petitioners. By arguing against the lethal injection cocktail, the same mixture being used in all states that currently have the death penalty and the Federal Government, and not the procedure itself, they opened up several potential avenues to get their murdering hides off death watch.
One of their more ingenious arguments was that absent a nurse, EMT or anesthesiologist there was no real way to make sure the first drug, once administered, was doing its job. The first drug, sodium thiopental, is designed to basically knock you out and make you unable to feel your own death. Petitioners argued that you needed a medical professional to make sure it worked and the condemned was really out of it, otherwise being awake for your own death is "cruel and unusual". Fortunately for them, the American medical community, EMT's and nurses associations all have standing ethical guidelines prohibiting their participation in capital punishment. Had the Court upheld this request from the condemned, it would have effectively banned capital punishment in the United States on a technicality. Nice try, better luck next time.
The petitioners also requested the Court order the states to find a new lethal cocktail, arguing that the present three-cocktail mix takes too long to inject and suffers from the aforementioned problem of unreliability in observation and confirmation of unconsciousness. They also argued that the tubes could become clogged. Not that it ever has, for they present no documented instance in support of their contention, but that it could. They therefore contend that it would be better if the states were ordered by the Court to adopt a new one-dose mortal martini. Since, as aforementioned, every state in the nation which has capital punishment on the books uses the same three-dose lethal injection method, and they admit there is no new one-dose injection waiting in the wings, the Court rightfully dismissed this as a stalling tactic and an attempt to get the Court to become a "Board of Inquiry" with authority to perpetually reexamine the death penalty every time someone argued that a better method had been developed, stripping the State's of their sole Constitutional authority to do so. They realized that if the Court had ordered the States to go to a one-dose method, without any scientific basis to do so, indeed, without any such drug currently available, it would amount to a moratorium on the death penalty while such a drug was created, tested and undoubtedly filed suit against in state and federal courts. Justice Clarence Thomas, as usual, brilliantly observed;
It is not a little ironic—and telling—that lethal injection, hailed just a few years ago as the humane alternative in light of which every other method of execution was deemed an unconstitutional relic of the past, is the subject of today’s challenge. It appears the Constitution is “evolving” even faster than I suspected. And it is obvious that, for some who oppose capital punishment on policy grounds, the only acceptable end point of the evolution is for this Court, in an exercise of raw judicial power unsupported by the text or history of the Constitution, or even by a contemporary moral consensus, to strike down the death penalty as cruel and unusual in all circumstances. In the meantime, though, the next best option for those seeking to abolish the death penalty is to embroil the States in never-ending litigation concerning the adequacy of their execution procedures.The "text or history" about which Justice Thomas spoke was the original meaning of the "Cruel and Unusual" punishment prohibition, which he elucidated by looking at every previous case against capital punishment upon which the High Court had ruled. The Court has never invalidated a method of execution on the grounds that it was "cruel and unusual" because the Court has never found a method of execution in the United States of America to be "tortuous". In the opinion, the majority was divided into separate concurring opinions and one united dissenting opinion. Only Justice Thomas took the time to explain why, using tried and true original intent methodology, lethal injection could not be "cruel and unusual". Basically, it is because we never impose "super-capital punishments".
Back in the day (a very research-y term I know) death was a proper punishment for a whole host of offenses. Certain crimes in Europe; like lese-majesty, high treason, witchcraft and mariticide, that is, crimes that were seen as pernicious to the entirety of the social order, were punishable by super-capital punishment. These kinds of punishments were designed to inflict severe pain on the victim as he was dying and to destroy his body in the process. In essence, the punishment was designed to be a "fate worse than death". It was a "cruel and unusual" punishment. He quoted In Re Kemmler (136 U.S. 436, 446; 1890);
“Punishments are cruel when they involve torture or a lingering death; but the punishment of death is not cruel, within the meaning of that word as used in the Constitution. It implies there something inhuman and barbarous, something more than the mere extinguishment of life.”This was designed to be a brief overview of the holding in the case, for a more thorough understanding you must, of course, read the 97-page decision your-own-self.
