Sonia Sotomayor's Scathing Death Penalty Dissent

Are lethal injection protocols cruel?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

[S]cience and experience… are now revealing that, at least with respect to midazolam-centered protocols, prisoners executed by lethal injection are suffering horrifying deaths beneath a ‘medically sterile aura of peace.’ … What cruel irony that the method that appears most humane may turn out to be our most cruel experiment yet… Like a hangman’s poorly tied noose or a malfunctioning electric chair, midazolam might render our latest method of execution too much for our conscience—and the Constitution—to bear.

— Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear Alabama death row inmate Thomas Arthur’s appeal to not die by midazolam lethal injection. Arthur proposed a firing squad as a viable alternative, but the Eleventh Circuit denied the request. 

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