Cruel and unusual death penalties

SCOTUS has issued its final opinions for the year, as well as a list of the new cases it will hear next year.  The first decision upholds Oklahoma's use of an anti-anxiety drug that a lower court found was virtually certain to induce unconsciousness before the state administered a paralytic drug and a heart-stopping drug.  The case arose after anti-death-penalty advocates successfully pressured drug companies to stop making barbiturates available for the death-penalty process, in response to which Oklahoma switched to an alternative method of inducing unconsciousness.  The argument then shifted to whether the alternative drug was adequate; the Court ruled today that the lower court had not committed clear error in accept expert testimony to the drug's effectiveness, and that Oklahoma was not required to prove that the new drug was as effective as the ones that no longer were available.

The oral arguments had been reported to be unusually violent for this staid forum.

Justice Alito delivered the majority opinion, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas.  Justices Scalia and Thomas issued a separate concurring opinion, not disagreeing with the reasoning, but responding to a dissent issued by Justices Breyer and Ginsburg, who expressed a renewed plea for the Court to take up the constitutionality of the death penalty.  Justices Kagan and Sotomayor did not join in this plea, which led observers at SCOTUSblog to wonder whether they, like past liberal Justices, had grown less vehement in their opposition to the death penalty after spending some time on the Supreme bench.  Instead, Kagan and Sotomayor issued a separate dissent addressing only the issues concerning Oklahoma's choice of consciousness-terminating drug.