Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/14-7955_aplc.pdf
Page Number: 124

28 

GLOSSIP v. GROSS 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

not get a constitutional free pass simply because it desires 
to deliver the ultimate penalty; its ends do not justify any 
and all means.  If a State wishes to carry out an execution, 
it must do so subject to the constraints that our Constitu­
tion imposes on it, including the obligation to ensure that
its chosen method is not cruel and unusual.  Certainly the 
condemned  has  no  duty  to  devise  or  pick  a  constitutional 
instrument of his or her own death. 

For  these  reasons,  the  Court’s  available-alternative 
leads  to  patently  absurd  consequences.
requirement 
Petitioners contend that Oklahoma’s current  protocol is a 
barbarous  method  of  punishment—the  chemical  equiva­
lent  of  being  burned  alive.    But  under  the  Court’s  new 
rule,  it  would  not  matter  whether  the  State  intended  to 
use  midazolam,  or  instead  to  have  petitioners  drawn  and
quartered, slowly tortured to death, or actually burned at 
the stake: because petitioners failed to prove the availabil­
ity  of  sodium  thiopental  or  pentobarbital,  the  State  could 
execute  them  using  whatever  means  it  designated.    But 
see Baze, 553 U. S., at 101–102 (THOMAS, J., concurring in
judgment)  (“It  strains  credulity  to  suggest  that  the  defin­
ing characteristic of burning at the stake, disemboweling, 
drawing and quartering, beheading, and the like was that 
they  involved  risks  of  pain  that  could  be  eliminated  by 
using  alternative  methods  of  execution”).8  The  Eighth
Amendment cannot possibly countenance such a result. 

D 
In  concocting  this  additional  requirement,  the  Court  is
motivated by a desire to preserve States’ ability to conduct 

—————— 

8 The Court protests that its holding does not extend so far, deriding 
this  description  of  the  logical  implications  of  its  legal  rule  as  “simply
not true” and “outlandish rhetoric.”  Ante, at 29.  But presumably when 
the Court imposes a “requirement o[n] all Eighth Amendment method-
of-execution  claims,”  that  requirement  in  fact  applies  to  “all”  methods 
of execution, without exception.  Ante, at 1 (emphasis added).