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The New York Times
Sooner or later, someone like Russell Bucklew was going to come along and throw a big wrench into the predictable back-and-forth debate over the constitutionality of executing people by lethal injection.
Last Wednesday night, just hours before Bucklew was scheduled to die in Missouri, the Supreme Court granted him a rare stay of execution after medical professionals found that an unusual congenital disorder would likely cause him to suffer on the executioner's table.
Bucklew, 46, was sentenced to death for killing his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend in 1996, and then abducting, beating and raping her.
He challenged the state's plan to put him to death by lethal injection on the grounds that a condition called cavernous hemangioma — which has led to expanding vascular tumors in his head and neck — would expose him to "unique risks," including "a substantial likelihood of hemorrhaging, choking, airway obstruction and suffocation."
The justices sent the case back to the lower courts to decide whether to hold further hearings.
Lethal injection has already come under increased scrutiny following multiple botched executions, most recently Oklahoma's appalling 43-minute torture of Clayton Lockett last month.
Multiple legal challenges to the procedure have centered on whether states may keep secret the drug protocols they use and the shady compounding pharmacies that make them.
But Missouri is now tasked with finding a way to kill Bucklew that doesn't hurt too much. At least state officials let him live until the Supreme Court ruled on the case, a courtesy they did not extend to another death-row inmate, Herbert Smulls, in January.
Welcome to the macabre absurdity of the modern American death penalty.
Of course, death by lethal injection became the standard method only because earlier methods — from hanging to the firing squad to the electric chair — were deemed too "barbaric," not because the state was taking a human life, but because the method of execution offended the sensitivities of the public in whose name the killing is carried out.
By now, it is clear that lethal injection is no less problematic than all the other methods, and that there is no reason to continue using it.
But capital punishment does not operate in the land of reason or logic; it operates in a perpetual state of secrecy and shame.
In most cases, it is conducted late at night, behind closed doors, and as antiseptically as possible. Were it to be done otherwise, Americans would recoil in horror, as they did after the debacle in Oklahoma. Bucklew's unusual case shows that death-penalty supporters can't have it both ways.
If they want the United States to remain a global outlier by killing its citizens, they must accept that there are no clean executions.