Deborah Denno quoted in Bloomberg about the Supreme Court’s decision to hear arguments in Glossip v. Gross, and whether the use of midazolam in Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocols violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which bans “cruel and unusual punishments.
Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor who has written frequently on the constitutionality questions surrounding lethal injection, agrees with Hofstra’s Freedman that the court may seek to sketch out an alternative to midazolam. But she says that may not do much good.
“Let’s say the Supreme Court says, ‘OK, you can use lethal injection, but you can’t use midazolam anymore.’ Even that will affect other states because they’re all running out of drugs,” she says. “The alternatives are running out.”
“People say, ‘Why is it so complicated to kill someone?’ Well, in fact, it is complicated—it’s a punishment done in a prison,” Denno says. “You’re not putting down a dog, or putting somebody to sleep in a hospital bed with a trained anesthesiologist there. So it’s good that we have the Supreme Court looking at this case. I will be very curious to see where its decision takes us.”
Read the entire Bloomberg article.