Opinion ID: 3065871
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: disparate treatment—equal protection

Text: CHALLENGE Towery and Moormann argue that the grant of discretion to the Director to make decisions regarding the manner in which his execution will be carried out violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. We do not agree. The 2012 Protocol, Towery and Moormann observe, grants the Director the discretion to select members of the IV Team, provided they are “appropriately trained,” as well as to designate the IV Team Leader. The Director also has discretion to choose either a three- or one-drug protocol, using either sodium pentothal or pentobarbital and to decide, “upon the advice of the IV Team Leader,” whether to use peripheral or central femoral IV access to administer the drugs (as long as a medically-licensed physician is available to implement the latter option). Towery and Moormann maintain that the broad grants of discretion to the Director violate the Equal Protection Clause, either because they burden a fundamental right and so fail strict scrutiny, or because they treat Towery and Moormann, individually, as a “class of one” without a rational basis for doing so. Neither argument has merit. [6] As we have already determined, the protocol as it will be implemented for Towery and Moormann’s executions does not violate their right under the Eighth Amendment to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. Where there is no Eighth Amendment violation, the district court ruled, that necessarily means that there has been no interference with fundamental rights sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause. See Mass. Bd. of Ret. v. Murgia, 427 U.S. 307, 312 (1976). We do not need to adopt this broad proposition to conclude that given the ways the Director has chosen to exercise his discretion in the upcoming executions, there has 2518 TOWERY v. BREWER been no showing here of any burden on the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. Towery and Moormann argue otherwise, relying on Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 105 (2000). Urging that there is a distinction between state action that violates a fundamental right and state action that merely burdens a fundamental right, they proffer that the latter was sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny in Bush and should also be here. [7] The right to vote, however, “ ‘can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.’ ” Id. (quoting Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 555 (1964)). A prisoner’s right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment, in contrast, is not affected simply because that prisoner is treated less favorably than another, where one means of execution is no more likely to create a risk of cruel and unusual punishment than the other, and both are constitutionally available. Treating one similarly situated prisoner differently from another with regard to punishment does not inherently impact the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment (although it might for other reasons violate the Equal Protection Clause). [8] That is not to say that there could not be exercises of discretion that do burden the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. The contrast with the litigation surrounding Ohio’s lethal injection protocol, invoked by Towery and Moormann in support of their fundamental rights Equal Protection argument, is instructive. In those cases, plaintiffs were able to show an actual pattern of treating prisoners differently in ways that did affect the risk of pain to which they would be subjected, and therefore the risk of being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. See In re Ohio Execution Protocol Litig., ___ F. Supp. 2d ___, 2012 WL 84548, at  (S.D. Ohio Jan. 11, 2012), motion to vacate stay denied, ___ F.3d at ___, 2012 WL 118322, at  (6th Cir. Jan. 13, 2012). Here, no TOWERY v. BREWER 2519 such showing has been made, either generally or with respect to the planned application of the protocol to Towery and Moormann’s executions. The fundamental rights prong of Equal Protection analysis therefore cannot apply. Alternatively, Towery and Moormann argue that each is a “class of one,” and that the protocol allows the Director to treat him differently from others similarly situated with no rational basis for doing so. See Vill. of Willowbrook v. Olech, 528 U.S. 562, 564 (2000). We disagree. [9] The class-of-one doctrine does not apply to forms of state action that “by their nature involve discretionary decisionmaking based on a vast array of subjective, individualized assessments.” Engquist v. Oregon Dep’t of Agric., 553 U.S. 591, 603 (2008). “In such cases,” the Court noted, the rule that people should be ‘treated alike, under like circumstances and conditions’ is not violated when one person is treated differently from others, because treating like individuals differently is an accepted consequence of the discretion granted. In such situations, allowing a challenge based on the arbitrary singling out of a particular person would undermine the very discretion that such state officials are entrusted to exercise. Id. [10] Here, decisions on matters such as which drug protocol to use, which people to select for the execution team, and whether to use a central femoral IV are, under Arizona’s statutory scheme, relegated to the Director, with no State law requirement that there be uniformity. Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 13757(A). Absent any pattern of generally exercising the discretion in a particular manner while treating one individual differently and detrimentally, there is no basis for Equal Protection scrutiny under the class-of-one theory. In other 2520 TOWERY v. BREWER words, the existence of discretion, standing alone, cannot be an Equal Protection violation. At the very least, there must be some respect in which the discretion is being exercised so that the complaining individual is being treated less favorably than others generally are. [11] Even if we were to subject the protocol’s grant of discretion to the Director to rational basis review, it would survive our consideration. It is rational for ADC to conclude that the Director is best situated to select the execution team from those available who meet the criteria listed in the protocol (assuming those criteria do not themselves create a risk of harm greater than that tolerable under the Eighth Amendment), or to decide that the Director should be the one to select which of the four possible drug sequences to use, or to assign to the Director and the IV Team Leader the task of selecting which IV site to use. It is entirely rational for these determinations to be made on a case-by-case basis, as they may well depend on individualized and changing factors such as the availability of particular people to participate in the execution, the supply of drugs available to the State at a given time, and the condition of the prisoner’s veins. The Equal Protection claim, as framed here, cannot succeed on the merits.