Deborah Denno was quoted in Yahoo News about an Ohio Supreme Court ruling that a state prisons agency can attempt to execute a man again after a failed first attempt by lethal injection.
One legal expert denounced Wednesday’s ruling, saying there is no legal precedent for it. Given the number of failed and drawn-out executions since 2009, as well as issues obtaining drugs, Broom may now be in a worse position.
“I find that unacceptable. First of all there’s no precedent that because the drugs didn’t make it into his system that that would be the basis for deciding that this wasn’t an attempted execution,” says Deborah Denno, the Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law at Fordham University in New York.
The majority opinion cited the Willie Francis case (Francis v. Resweber) as precedent for Ohio to attempt an execution of Broom for a second time, but Professor Denno disagrees.
The Willie Francis case was an execution in 1946, where the executioners failed to generate a strong enough electrical current, leaving Mr. Francis able to walk away from the electric chair. The case then went to the Supreme Court in 1947, where the justices ruled in favor of allowing the state of Louisiana a second chance to electrocute Francis, which was successful.
“That’s a Supreme Court Case in 1947, before the Eighth Amendment ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ clause even applied to states,” Denno says. “The cruel and unusual punishment clause didn’t even apply to states until 1962 in this country.”
