Deborah Denno quoted in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on how concern over comfort for the condemned can be hard to understand for victims who suffered greatly.
The U.S. has not seen another execution since Lockett’s. Missouri had planned to execute another murderer, Russell Bucklew, on May 21. But Bucklew’s lawyers argued that a rare vascular condition could cause terrible suffering with a lethal injection. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened to halt the execution to allow lower courts more time to consider whether the injection could violate Bucklew’s civil rights.
But it was such a rare action by the court that “it should be a signal to states to be careful,” said Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, who studies the death penalty.
Read the entire St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.