Still Tinkering by Linda Greenhouse
Twenty years have passed since Justice Harry A. Blackmun, at age 85 and just months away from retirement, renounced the death penalty. “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,” he declared.
There’s been an awful lot of tinkering going on lately.
Oklahoma’s botched attempt last month to carry out an execution with a previously untried combination of lethal drugs from secret sources shone a spotlight on how states are scrambling to deal with the increasingly unreliable supply of the ingredients of the once standard three-drug cocktail. Clayton D. Lockett, the condemned Oklahoma murderer who was seen writhing and moaning after the badly administered first drug failed to render him fully unconscious, died of an apparent heart attack nearly two hours after officials had started trying to kill him.
Given the Roberts court’s conservative trajectory, it may seem a waste of energy even to wonder whether that incident, or the disarray on the whole lethal injection front, might persuade the justices to take another look at the death penalty.
No current member of the court is on record as opposing capital punishment. Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired three years ago, was the last. He announced his opposition to the death penalty in a 2008 opinion, and his new book, “Six Amendments,” proposes a constitutional amendment “to put an end to what has become a wretched arrangement.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/15/opinion/greenhouse-still-tinkering.html?hp&rref=opinion
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