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Last night, Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented in the Supreme Court’s denial of the application to stay the execution of Billy Ray Irick. Irick, convicted of killing and raping a 7-year-old girl, was executed last night. But it wasn’t the fact of the execution that Sotomayor objected to, but rather the method.
Tennessee used a three-drug combination that, as Sotomayor details in her dissent, cause “sensations of drowning, suffocating, and being burned alive from the inside out.” Sotomayor went on to note that the state’s contention that the first drug in the combination would stop the torturous feelings were disproven by the medical expert:
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“In theory, the first drug in the three-drug protocol, midazolam, is supposed to render a person unable to feel pain during an execution. But the medical experts who testified here explained that midazolam would not work, and the trial court credited that testimony.”
Sotomayor would have granted state courts more time to consider Irick’s case, instead of being beholden to Tennessee’s rushed schedule to kill him:
“In refusing to grant Irick a stay, the court today turns a blind eye to a proven likelihood that the state of Tennessee is on the verge of inflicting several minutes of torturous pain on an inmate in its custody, while shrouding his suffering behind a veneer of paralysis. I cannot in good conscience join in this ‘rush to execute’ without first seeking every assurance that our precedent permits such a result.”
She’s disturbed what allowing this execution means for the country:
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“If the law permits this execution to go forward in spite of the horrific final minutes that Irick may well experience, then we have stopped being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism.”
Mic drop.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).