Justice Sotomayor: 'We have stopped being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism'
The Supreme Court just ruled that a man may be tortured to death
IAN MILLHISER AUG 9, 2018, 4:16 PM
Justice Sonia Sotomayor concludes her dissent in Irick v. Tennessee with the kind of rhetorical flourish that is rarely seen in judicial opinions. “If the law permits this execution to go forward in spite of the horrific final minutes that” the inmate at the heart of this case is likely to experience, “then we have stopped being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism.”
The justice reaches this conclusion after her Court effectively ruled on Thursday that Billy Ray Irick, a death row inmate, could be tortured to death. This result is not surprising — the issue at stake in Irick largely tracks the issues presented in Glossip v. Gross, a 2015 decision upholding Oklahoma’s use of a drug cocktail that almost certainly subjects death row inmates to excruciating pain as their paralyzed body slowly dies.
The state of Tennessee, like Oklahoma, uses a three-drug cocktail in its executions. The first drug, midazolam, is supposed to prevent inmates from feeling pain. The second drug paralyzes the inmate, while the third eventually causes a fatal heart attack.
Yet there is considerable evidence that midazolam is not an effective painkiller, even when inmates receive enormous doses of the drug. As Sotomayor noted during the 2015 argument in Glossip, an Arizona inmate who received the three-drug cocktail spent two hours in apparent agony despite being given a massive dose of midazolam.
https://thinkprogress.org/justice-sotomayor-we-have-stopped-being-a-civilized-nation-and-accepted-barbarism-ca4652d4a938/
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