Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-8151
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 11:19:30+00:00

Document:
In Baze v. Rees, 553 U. S. 35, a plurality of this Court concluded that a State’s refusal to alter its execution protocol could violate the Eighth Amendment only if an inmate first identified a “feasible, readily implemented” alternative procedure that would “significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain.” Id., at 52. A majority of the Court subsequently held Baze’s plurality opinion to be controlling. See Glossip v. Gross, 576 U. S. ___.
Ultimately, this Court answered these legal challenges in Baze v. Rees, 553 U. S. 35 (2008). Addressing Kentucky’s similar three-drug protocol, The Chief Justice, joined by Justice Alito and Justice Kennedy, concluded that a State’s refusal to alter its lethal injection protocol could violate the Eighth Amendment only if an inmate first identified a “feasible, readily implemented” alternative procedure that would “significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain.” Id., at 52. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, thought the protocol passed muster because it was not intended “to add elements of terror, pain, or disgrace to the death penalty.” Id., at 107. Justice Breyer reached the same result because he saw no evidence that the protocol created “a significant risk of unnecessary suffering.” Id., at 113. And though Justice Stevens objected to the continued use of the death penalty, he agreed that petitioners’ evidence was insufficient. Id., at 87. After this Court decided Baze, it denied review in a case seeking to challenge Missouri’s similar lethal injection protocol. Taylor v. Crawford, 487 F. 3d 1072 (2007), cert. denied, 553 U. S. 1004 (2008).
But that still was not the end of it. Next, Mr. Bucklew and other inmates unsuccessfully challenged Missouri’s protocol in state court, alleging that it had been adopted in contravention of Missouri’s Administrative Procedure Act. Middleton v. Missouri Dept. of Corrections, 278 S. W. 3d 193 (Mo.), cert. denied, 556 U. S. 1255 (2009). They also unsuccessfully challenged the protocol in federal court, this time alleging it was pre-empted by various federal statutes. Ringo v. Lombardi, 677 F. 3d 793 (CA8 2012). And Mr. Bucklew sought to intervene in yet another lawsuit alleging that Missouri’s protocol violated the Eighth Amendment because unqualified personnel might botch its administration. That lawsuit failed too. Clemons v. Crawford, 585 F. 3d 1119 (CA8 2009), cert. denied, 561 U. S. 1026 (2010).
These latest protocol challenges yielded mixed results. The district court dismissed both the inmates’ facial challenge and Mr. Bucklew’s as-applied challenge. But, at Mr. Bucklew’s request, this Court agreed to stay his execution until the Eighth Circuit could hear his appeal. Bucklew v. Lombardi, 572 U. S. 1131 (2014). Ultimately, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the facial challenge. Zink v. Lombardi, 783 F. 3d 1089 (en banc) (per curiam), cert. denied, 576 U. S. ___ (2015). Then, turning to the as-applied challenge and seeking to apply the test set forth by the Baze plurality, the court held that Mr. Bucklew’s complaint failed as a matter of law to identify an alternative procedure that would significantly reduce the risks he alleged would flow from the State’s lethal injection protocol. Yet, despite this dispositive shortcoming, the court of appeals decided to give Mr. Bucklew another chance to plead his case. The court stressed that, on remand before the district court, Mr. Bucklew had to identify “at the earliest possible time” a feasible, readily implemented alternative procedure that would address those risks. Bucklew v. Lombardi, 783 F. 3d 1120, 1127–1128 (2015) (en banc).
Shortly after the Eighth Circuit issued its judgment, this Court decided Glossip v. Gross, 576 U. S. ___ (2015), rejecting a challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol. There, the Court clarified that The Chief Justice’s plurality opinion in Baze was controlling under Marks v. United States, 430 U. S. 188 (1977). In doing so, it reaffirmed that an inmate cannot successfully challenge a method of execution under the Eighth Amendment unless he identifies “an alternative that is ‘feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain.’ ” 576 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 12–13). Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, reiterated his view that the Eighth Amendment “prohibits only those methods of execution that are deliberately designed to inflict pain,” but he joined the Court’s opinion because it correctly explained why petitioners’ claim failed even under the controlling opinion in Baze. Glossip, 576 U. S., at ___ (concurring opinion) (slip op., at 1) (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted).
The Constitution allows capital punishment. See Glossip, 576 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 2–4); Baze, 553 U. S., at 47. In fact, death was “the standard penalty for all serious crimes” at the time of the founding. S. Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History 23 (2002) (Banner). Nor did the later addition of the Eighth Amendment outlaw the practice. On the contrary—the Fifth Amendment, added to the Constitution at the same time as the Eighth, expressly contemplates that a defendant may be tried for a “capital” crime and “deprived of life” as a pen-alty, so long as proper procedures are followed. And the First Congress, which proposed both Amendments, made a number of crimes punishable by death. See Act of Apr. 30, 1790, 1Stat. 112. Of course, that doesn’t mean the American people must continue to use the death penalty. The same Constitution that permits States to authorize capital punishment also allows them to outlaw it. But it does mean that the judiciary bears no license to end a debate reserved for the people and their representatives.
Consistent with the Constitution’s original understanding, this Court in Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U. S. 130 (1879), permitted an execution by firing squad while observing that the Eighth Amendment forbade the gruesome methods of execution described by Blackstone “and all others in the same line of unnecessary cruelty.” Id., at 135–136. A few years later, the Court upheld a sentence of death by electrocution while observing that, though electrocution was a new mode of punishment and therefore perhaps could be considered “unusual,” it was not “cruel” in the constitutional sense: “[T]he punishment of death is not cruel, within the meaning of that word as used in the Constitution. [Cruelty] implies . . . something inhuman and barbarous, something more than the mere extinguishment of life.” In re Kemmler, 136 U. S. 436, 447 (1890).
Take this one. A facial challenge is really just a claim that the law or policy at issue is unconstitutional in all its applications. So classifying a lawsuit as facial or as-applied affects the extent to which the invalidity of the challenged law must be demonstrated and the corresponding “breadth of the remedy,” but it does not speak at all to the substantive rule of law necessary to establish a constitutional violation. Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U. S. 310, 331 (2010). Surely it would be strange for the same words of the Constitution to bear entirely different meanings depending only on how broad a remedy the plaintiff chooses to seek. See Gross v. United States, 771 F. 3d 10, 14–15 (CADC 2014) (“ ‘[T]he substantive rule of law is the same for both [facial and as-applied] challenges’ ”); Brooklyn Legal Servs. Corp. v. Legal Servs. Corp., 462 F. 3d 219, 228 (CA2 2006) (the facial/as-applied distinction affects “the extent to which the invalidity of a statute need be demonstrated,” not “the substantive rule of law to be used”). And surely, too, it must count for something that we have found not a single court decision in over 200 years suggesting that the Eighth Amendment’s meaning shifts in this way. To the contrary, our precedent suggests just the opposite. In the related context of an Eighth Amendment challenge to conditions of confinement, we have seen “no basis whatever” for applying a different legal standard to “deprivations inflicted upon all prisoners” and those “inflicted upon particular prisoners.” Wilson v. Seiter, 501 U. S. 294, 299, n. 1 (1991).
Here’s yet another problem with Mr. Bucklew’s argument: It invites pleading games. The line between facial and as-applied challenges can sometimes prove “amorphous,” Elgin v. Department of Treasury, 567 U. S. 1, 15 (2012), and “not so well defined,” Citizens United, 558 U. S., at 331. Consider an example. Suppose an inmate claims that the State’s lethal injection protocol violates the Eighth Amendment when used to execute anyone with a very common but not quite universal health condition. Should such a claim be regarded as facial or as-applied? In another context, we sidestepped a debate over how to categorize a comparable claim—one that neither sought “to strike [the challenged law] in all its applications” nor was “limited to plaintiff’s particular case”—by concluding that “[t]he label is not what matters.” Doe v. Reed, 561 U. S. 186, 194 (2010). To hold now, for the first time, that choosing a label changes the meaning of the Constitution would only guarantee a good deal of litigation over labels, with lawyers on each side seeking to classify cases to maximize their tactical advantage. Unless increasing the delay and cost involved in carrying out executions is the point of the exercise, it’s hard to see the benefit in placing so much weight on what can be an abstruse exercise.
Finally, the burden Mr. Bucklew must shoulder under the Baze-Glossip test can be overstated. An inmate seeking to identify an alternative method of execution is not limited to choosing among those presently authorized by a particular State’s law. Missouri itself seemed to acknowledge as much at oral argument. Tr. of Oral Arg. 65. So, for example, a prisoner may point to a well-established protocol in another State as a potentially viable option. Of course, in a case like that a court would have to inquire into the possibility that one State possessed a legitimate reason for declining to adopt the protocol of another. See supra, at 13–14. And existing state law might be relevant to determining the proper procedural vehicle for the inmate’s claim. See Hill v. McDonough, 547 U. S. 573, 582–583 (2006) (if the relief sought in a 42 U. S. C. §1983 action would “foreclose the State from implementing the [inmate’s] sentence under present law,” then “recharacterizing a complaint as an action for habeas corpus might be proper”). But the Eighth Amendment is the supreme law of the land, and the comparative assessment it requires can’t be controlled by the State’s choice of which methods to authorize in its statutes. In light of this, we see little likelihood that an inmate facing a serious risk of pain will be unable to identify an available alternative—assuming, of course, that the inmate is more interested in avoiding unnecessary pain than in delaying his execution.
Having (re)confirmed that anyone bringing a method of execution claim alleging the infliction of unconstitution-ally cruel pain must meet the Baze-Glossip test, we can now turn to the question whether Mr. Bucklew is able to sat-isfy that test. Has he identified a feasible and readily im-plemented alternative method of execution the State refused to adopt without a legitimate reason, even though it would significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain? Because the case comes to us after the entry of summary judgment, this appeal turns on whether Mr. Bucklew has shown a genuine issue of material fact warranting a trial.
3 Here’s the full quotation, with the portion quoted by the dissent underlined:“As a result of his inability to maintain the integrity of his airway for the period of time beginning with the injection of the Pentobarbital solution and ending with Mr. Bucklew’s death several minutes to as long as many minutes later, Mr. Bucklew would be highly likely to experience feelings of ‘air hunger’ and the excruciating pain of prolonged suffocation resulting from the complete obstruction of his airway by the large vascular tumor.” App. 222.
4 The State contends that Mr. Bucklew’s claim should fail for yet another reason: because, in the State’s view, the evidence does not show that he is very likely to suffer “ ‘severe pain’ ” cognizable under the Eighth Amendment. Glossip v. Gross, 576 U. S. ___, ___ (2015) (slip op., at 13) (quoting Baze v. Rees, 553 U. S. 35, 52 (2008); emphasis added). We have no need, however, to address that argument because (as explained above) Mr. Bucklew fails even to show that a feasible and readily available alternative could significantly reduce the pain he alleges.
5 Seeking to relitigate Dunn v. Ray, the principal dissent asserts that that case involved no undue delay because the inmate “brought his claim only five days after he was notified” that the State would not allow his spiritual adviser to be present with him in the execution chamber itself, although it would allow the adviser to be present on the other side of a glass partition. Post, at 17. But a state statute listed “[t]he spiritual adviser of the condemned” as one of numerous individ-uals who would be allowed to “be present at an execution,” many of whom—such as “newspaper reporters,” “relatives or friends of the condemned person,” and “the victim’s immediate family members”—obviously would not be allowed into the chamber itself. Ala. Code §15–18–83 (2018). The inmate thus had long been on notice that there was a question whether his adviser would be allowed into the chamber or required to remain on the other side of the glass. Yet although he had been on death row since 1999, and the State had set a date for his execution on November 6, 2018, he waited until January 23, 2019—just 15 days before the execution—to ask for clarification. He then brought a claim 10 days before the execution and sought an indefinite stay. This delay implicated the “strong equitable presumption” that no stay should be granted “where a claim could have been brought at such a time as to allow consideration of the merits without requiring entry of a stay.” Hill v. McDonough, 547 U. S. 573, 584 (2006).
I adhere to my view that “a method of execution violates the Eighth Amendment only if it is deliberately designed to inflict pain.” Baze v. Rees, 553 U. S. 35, 94 (2008) (opinion concurring in judgment); ante, at 14. Because there is no evidence that Missouri designed its protocol to inflict pain on anyone, let alone Russell Bucklew, I would end the inquiry there. Nonetheless, I join the Court’s opinion in full because it correctly explains why Bucklew’s claim fails even under the Court’s precedents.
When an inmate raises an as-applied constitutional challenge to a particular method of execution—that is, a challenge to a method of execution that is constitutional in general but that the inmate says is very likely to cause him severe pain—one question is whether the inmate must identify an available alternative method of execution that would significantly reduce the risk of severe pain. Applying our recent decisions in Glossip v. Gross, 576 U. S. ___ (2015), and Baze v. Rees, 553 U. S. 35 (2008) (plurality opinion), the Court’s answer to that question is yes. Under those precedents, I agree with the Court’s holding and join the Court’s opinion.
I begin with a factual question: whether Bucklew has established that, because of his rare medical condition, the State’s current method of execution risks subjecting him to excessive suffering. See Glossip v. Gross, 576 U. S. ___, ___ (2015) (slip op., at 13) (requiring “a demonstrated risk of severe pain”); see also Baze v. Rees, 553 U. S. 35, 50 (2008) (plurality opinion) (requiring “a substantial risk of serious harm” (internal quotation marks omitted)).
There is no dispute as to the applicable summary judgment standard. Because the State moved for summary judgment, it can prevail if, but only if, it “shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact.” Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 56(a); see also Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., 477 U. S. 242, 248 (1986). On review, we examine the record as a whole, which includes “depositions, documents, [and] affidavits or declarations.” Rule 56(c). And we must construe the evidence in the light most favorable to Bucklew and draw every justifiable inference in his favor. See Tolan v. Cotton, 572 U. S. 650, 651 (2014) (per curiam).
The District Court was right. The evidence, taken in the light most favorable to Bucklew, creates a genuine factual issue as to whether Missouri’s lethal injection protocol would subject him to several minutes of “severe pain and suffering,” Glossip, 576 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 13), during which he would choke and suffocate on his own blood. In my view, executing Bucklew by forcing him to choke on his grossly enlarged uvula and suffocate on his blood would exceed “the limits of civilized standards.” Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U. S. 407, 435 (2008) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Trop v. Dulles, 356 U. S. 86, 100–101 (1958) (plurality opinion). The experts dispute whether Bucklew’s execution will prove as unusually painful as he claims, but resolution of that dispute is a matter for trial.
I joined the dissent in Glossip, but for present purposes I accept the Glossip majority opinion as governing. I nonetheless do not believe its “alternative method” requirement applies in this case. We “often read general language in judicial opinion[s] as referring in context to circumstances similar to the circumstances then before the Court and not referring to quite different circumstances that the Court was not then considering.” Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U. S. 419, 424 (2004). And while I acknowledge that the Court in Glossip spoke in unqualified terms, the circumstances in Glossip were indeed “different” in relevant respects from the circumstances presented here.
Second, precedent counsels against extending Glossip. Neither this Court’s oldest method-of-execution case, Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U. S. 130 (1879), nor any subsequent decision of this Court until Glossip, held that prisoners who challenge a State’s method of execution must identify an alternative means by which the State may execute them. To the contrary, in Hill v. McDonough, 547 U. S. 573 (2006), the Court squarely and unanimously rejected the argument that a prisoner must “identif[y] an alternative, authorized method of execution.” Id., at 582. The Court noted that any such requirement would “change the traditional pleading requirements for §1983 actions,” which we were not at liberty to do. Ibid. It is thus difficult to see how the “alternative-method” requirement could be “compelled by our understanding of the Constitution,” ante, at 17, even though the Constitution itself never hints at such a requirement, even though we did not apply such a requirement in more than a century of method-of-execution cases, and even though we unanimously rejected such a requirement in Hill. And while the Court in Glossip did not understand itself to be bound by Hill, see Glossip, 576 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 15) (distinguishing Hill on the theory that Hill merely rejected a heightened pleading requirement for §1983 suits), the two decisions remain in considerable tension. Confining Glossip’s “alternative method” requirement to facial challenges would help to reconcile them.
For another thing, we have repeatedly held that the Eighth Amendment is not a static prohibition that proscribes the same things that it proscribed in the 18th century. Rather, it forbids punishments that would be considered cruel and unusual today. The Amendment prohibits “unnecessary suffering” in the infliction of punishment, which this Court has understood to prohibit punishments that are “grossly disproportionate to the severity of the crime” as well as punishments that do not serve any “penological purpose.” Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U. S. 97, 103, and n. 7 (1976). The Constitution prohibits gruesome punishments even though they may have been common at the time of the founding. Few would dispute, for example, the unconstitutionality of “a new law providing public lashing, or branding of the right hand, as punishment . . . [e]ven if it could be demonstrated unequivocally that these were not cruel and unusual measures in 1791.” Scalia, Originalism: The Lesser Evil, 57 U. Cin. L. Rev. 849, 861 (1989). The question is not, as Justice Thomas maintains, whether a punishment is deliberately inflicted to cause unnecessary pain, but rather whether we would today consider the punishment to cause excessive suffering.
Courts’ equitable discretion in handling stay requests is governed by well-established principles. See Nken v. Holder, 556 U. S. 418, 434 (2009). Courts examine the stay applicant’s likelihood of success on the merits,whether the applicant will suffer irreparable injury without a stay, whether other parties will suffer substantial injury from a stay, and public interest considerations. Ibid.
It is equally well established that “[d]eath is a punish-ment different from all other sanctions in kind rather than degree.” Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U. S. 280, 303–304 (1976). For that reason, the equities in a death penalty case will almost always favor the prisoner so long as heor she can show a reasonable probability of success on the merits. See Nken, 556 U. S., at 434 (noting that success on the merits and irreparable injury “are the most critical” factors); cf. Glossip, 576 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 11) (observing, in a preliminary-injunction posture, that “[t]he parties agree that this case turns on whether petitioners are able to establish a likelihood of success on the merits” and analyzing the case accordingly); accord, id., at ___ (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 22). This accords with each court’s “ ‘duty to search for constitutional error with painstaking care’ ” in capital cases. Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U. S. 419, 422 (1995).
1 A skewed view of the facts caused the majority to misapply these principles and misuse its “equitable powers,” see ante, at 30, and n. 5, in vacating the Court of Appeals’ unanimous stay in Dunn v. Ray, 586 U. S. ___ (2019). Even today’s belated explanation from the majority rests on the mistaken premise that Domineque Ray could have figured out sooner that Alabama planned to deny his imam access to the execution chamber. But see id., at ___ (Kagan, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 3) (noting that the governing statute authorized both the inmate’s imam and the prison’s Christian chaplain to attend the execution, and that “the prison refused to give Ray a copy of its own practices and procedures” that would have clarified the two clergymen’s degrees of access); Ray v. Commissioner, Ala. Dept. of Corrections, 915 F. 3d 689, 701–703 (CA11 2019).
2 See Zagorski v. Parker, 586 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2018) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting from denial of application for stay and denial of certio-rari) (slip op., at 2–3) (describing Tennessee’s recent equivocation about the availability of its preferred lethal injection protocol); Glossip, 576 U. S., at ___ (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 29) (noting States’ “scramble” to formulate “new and untested” execution methods); Sepulvado v. Jindal, 739 F. 3d 716, 717–718 (CA5 2013) (Dennis, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc) (describing Louisiana’s refusal to inform a prisoner of the drugs that would be used to execute him); Denno, Lethal Injection Chaos Post-Baze, 102 Geo. L. J. 1331, 1376–1380 (2014) (describing increased secrecy around execution procedures).
3 See Connick v. Thompson, 563 U. S. 51, 55–56, and n. 1 (2011) (intentionally suppressed exculpatory crime lab report discovered a month before a scheduled execution); Ex parte Braziel, No. WR–72,186–01 (Tex. Crim. App., Dec. 11, 2018), pp. 1–2 (Alcala, J., dissenting) (disclosure by the State of “new information about possible prosecutorial misconduct” the same day as an execution).

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