Judge to hear arguments on Montana’s lethal injection method

“This court can not find that the possibility of an accident such as the plaintiffs predict causes the protocol to violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, ” Bonnyman said, according to The Tennessean.

A Tennessee judge has upheld the state’s lethal-injection process for executing inmates.

She also said the plaintiffs didn’t show during a lengthy trial that there have been problems in states where the method has been used.

Representatives for the ACLU said in their trial briefing that this case is not meant to challenge the constitutionality of the death penalty, rather it concerns the protocol used by the executioners.

Ronald Waterman, one of two attorneys for the Montana inmates, said the federal injunction was a good sign for people on death row in both states. They say those factors and the use of compounded pentobarbital create risk of pain and suffering and lingering death. A year later, she approved the state’s proposal that actions such as shaking an inmate were adequate to determine if procedures were effective.

Assistant Attorney General Mark Fowler, who has led Montana’s defense in the lethal injection case, did not return calls or email for comment before the hearing. Hood’s office asked the state supreme court in July to set a Thursday execution for convicted murderer Richard Jordan, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, but the state court did not act.

This is Bonneyman’s second ruling on Tennessee’s capital punishment laws: In 2010, she ruled that Tennessee’s previous execution protocol of using three drugs for lethal injection was unconstitutional, as it allowed “for death by suffocation while conscious.”

“In recent years, however, manufacturers of the anesthesia drug have refused to provide it for executions on moral, ethical and – in some cases – public relations grounds”. But Oklahoma and other death penalty states counter that, properly used in very high doses, midazolam is an appropriate drug – and on [June 29], a five-justice majority agreed.