The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from a condemned Missouri inmate who is seeking to be executed by firing squad instead of lethal injection. Lawyers for Ernest Lee Johnson—whose execution was stayed by the top court in 2015—argued that brain damage from tumor surgery would make execution by lethal injection so "excruciatingly painful" that it would violate the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, NPR reports. The lawyers said the surgery left Johnson vulnerable to severe seizures, which can be triggered by the execution drugs. The court's three more liberal justices dissented from the conservative majority's decision to reject the appeal and allow a decision from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to stand.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the minority, described the execution method as "akin to torture" and accused the Eighth Circuit of trying to dispose of the issue too quickly, NBC reports. "We should not countenance the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment simply for the sake of expediency," she wrote. Another dissenter, Justice Stephen Breyer, noted that the firing squad is now a highly unusual method of execution and said Johnson was asking the courts to decide between a "cruel" method of execution and an "unusual" one, highlighting the difficulties the death penalty presents for the "just application of the law." Missouri can now set a new execution date for Johnson, who killed three people with a hammer during a convenience store robbery in 1994. (More capital punishment stories.)
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