Gorsuch and the gang in Bucklew go beyond “deliberate indifference” to “deliberate cruelty.”īut judicial indifference to the “deliberate indifference” standard under the Eighth Amendment is a good way to segue to the other travesty upon justice that unfolded last week. Gamble“that deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners constitutes the ‘unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain’” proscribed by the Eighth Amendment. In more enlightened times, the Supreme Court declared 43 years ago in Estelle v. An execution under the Bucklew precedent is both intentional and deliberately mindful of the pain it will inflict on the human being to be killed. This wanton formulation by the Supreme Court makes the executioner, and thus the rest of us by proxy, little better than the person the state is killing in our name. What Justice Gorsuch and the rest of the Court’s conservatives are saying in Bucklew is that murderers may, by law, be treated by the government in the moment of their death the way those murderers treated their own victims. And the purpose behind that is to speed up the “ machinery of death,” to paraphrase former Justice Harry Blackmun’s unforgettable phrase. The idea is to dehumanize a defendant, to tag him forever with the worst thing he’s ever done, and then argue that he therefore merits little succor under the Eighth Amendment. State attorneys defending a conviction, or an execution like the one planned for Bucklew, always want reviewing judges to have the details of the crime on their minds when they are evaluating the merits of the defendant’s claims.ĭon’t forget, each of these briefs implicitly argues that you are here mainly to do justice to the victim of this crime and not to this convicted murderer whose lawyers are asking for help. There is always a gruesome recitation of the facts of the crime even if those facts are irrelevant to the legal issues raised on appeal. It also, not coincidentally, echoes the way Justice Clarence Thomas for decades has spiced up his own death penalty opinions. Gorsuch’s rationale in Bucklew not coincidentally is of the same pound-of-flesh mentality that animates almost every appellate brief written by state prosecutors in almost every capital case. Precythe, “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death - something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.” “The Eighth Amendment,” he wrote in Bucklew v. Too bad, ruled Justice Neil Gorsuch, citing hoary 18th-century practices as his guide. Bucklew is a murderer on death row, and the state wants to execute him even though he has a rare medical condition that will likely result in him choking to death on his own blood when he gets his lethal injection. There already has been plenty of smart analysis about the Supreme Court’s lamentable decision in the case of Russell Bucklew in Missouri. Cruel in the sense that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment,” designed to limit the government when it turns its might against a person, has been turned upside down to permit punishment that is both intentionally barbaric and chillingly routine. Cruel in the sense that Alabama prison officials have known for decades that their penitentiaries are places of horrific sexual violence and mayhem and still have refused to fix the problem. Practices designed to be cruel in the sense that five conservative justices on the Supreme Court now say it is okay if a death row inmate with a grave illness feels excruciating pain when his executioners pump lethal drugs into his body. And it passes for justice in the Age of Trump. In both cases, the public servants acting in our name have embraced or defended policies designed to be cruel toward those they target. In both instances, judges and other officials have tolerated, and at times encouraged, the erosion of constitutional rights of people who have been systematically dehumanized in the eyes of our hollow laws. Supreme Court decision last week that endorsed a Missouri execution likely to torture the condemned and the sickening mistreatment of prisoners in Alabama (and countless other jurisdictions across the country).
You can draw a straight line in American justice between the U.S. Advance Constitutional Change Show / hide.National Task Force on Democracy Reform & the Rule of Law.Government Targeting of Minority Communities Show / hide.Campaign Finance in the Courts Show / hide.Gerrymandering & Fair Representation Show / hide.Ensure Every American Can Vote Show / hide.
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