In a decision expected to clear the way for states to resume executions by lethal injection, the Supreme Court upheld yesterday Kentucky's execution procedures, which are used by nearly every state with a death penalty law, including Maryland.
Executions across the country have been on hold since the high court agreed in September to hear the case of two Kentucky death row inmates who challenged the three-drug procedure, which is used to anesthetize, paralyze and stop the heart.
Within hours of yesterday's ruling, the governor of Virginia announced that he was lifting his state's moratorium on executions, while several prosecutors and governors around the country said they would seek execution dates as quickly as the courts can set them.
"We may see in some states a burst of executions," said Kent S. Scheidegger, legal director of the California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports the death penalty. "Because there haven't been any executions since [the Supreme Court] took this case in the fall, a number of cases have reached the end of the normal appellate pipeline. So there's a buildup."
The court's 7-2 ruling has no direct impact on Maryland's de facto ban on executions, which was the result of a December 2006 ruling by the state Court of Appeals that the injection procedures were improperly developed without legislative oversight or public input.
Gov. Martin O'Malley has made no move to order new procedures, but after the high court decision, Republican leaders urged him to do so.
In a written statement released yesterday evening, O'Malley said he was reviewing the high court's 97-page decision. He noted the legislature's recent passage of a law establishing a commission to study the costs of Maryland's death penalty and its effectiveness as a deterrent to crime.
"We will follow the law in both cases," the governor said.
The Kentucky case, Baze v. Rees, virtually mirrors a federal lawsuit filed in Maryland by death row inmate Vernon L. Evans Jr. That case stalled when the state's highest court halted executions in ruling on an appeal that Evans filed in state court.
Like those involved with the Maryland federal case, lawyers for the Kentucky inmates challenged the procedure in which three drugs are used to put condemned prisoners to death - an anesthetic, a drug that paralyzes muscles, including the lungs and diaphragm, and a drug that stops the heart.
