GOT XANAX? So it’s come to this: It’s time to bring back the firing squads. Weirdly, this would be the most sensible and un-ironically humane suggestion to come out of the 127 pages of nasty, snarky, and scholarly exchanges between members of the U.S. Supreme Court on the subject of the death penalty this week. I’m not sure why, but in recent years, the Supreme Court of the United States has come to be known as SCOTUS, much the way the president is now popularly known as POTUS. Both acronyms conjure images of body parts I’d rather not visualize, so somebody needs to fix that. That being said, it’s been an extremely productive week for SCOTUS, and the results have been profoundly mixed. Gays can now marry, while efforts to keep mercury out of the air took a punch in the throat. Yet another attempt to deep-six the Affordable Care Act , on hyper technical grounds, was sensibly deep-sixed.
On the death penalty, the Supremes were asked to decide whether using a Xanax-like medication — as opposed to the barbiturates traditionally used — as part of the chemical cocktail used to dispatch individuals sentenced to death constituted cruel and unusual punishment. A majority concluded there was no evidence to suggest midazolam — the new knockout agent under contention — was too weak and feckless to reliably mask the excruciating pain inflicted by the two other compounds that make up lethal injections. More creatively — and weirdly — the majority also opined that any inmates challenging lethal injections on cruel-and-unusual grounds needed to first identify an alternative method to be offed before their petitions could be considered.
Much of the debate was totally predictable yet compelling. In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer made a sweeping case against capital punishment in any form, arguing innocent people have been and will continue to be wrongly executed. Since 2002, Breyer pointed out, 115 inmates sentenced to death were factually exonerated. In 2014, there were six. All had served more than 30 years before their innocence was established. Those were the lucky ones. The FBI examined 35 capital cases and found flawed microscopic hair analysis had been submitted by the prosecution as evidence in 33. Nine of the 33 defendants had already been executed. In response, Justice Clarence Thomas described the unspeakable cruelties inflicted by capital case defendants in such convincing detail I had to rinse the blood from my mouth. Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom withering disdain is high art, sneered and withered as only he can. He mocked Justice Breyer’s dissenting treatise as being “devoid of any meaningful legal argument,” adding it was “full of internal contradictions and (it must be said) gobbledygook.”