Supreme Court Stays Execution In A Sign Of A Broader Halt

by Linda Greenhouse - October 30th, 2007 - The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — Moments before a Mississippi prisoner was scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday evening, the Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution and thus gave a nearly indisputable indication that a majority intends to block all executions until the court decides a lethal injection case from Kentucky next spring.

There were two dissenters, Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr., but neither they nor the majority gave reasons for their positions.

This man, Earl Berry, whose execution was halted, killed a woman leaving church, abducting her and savagely beating her to death with his bare hands . . . . 20 years ago. The unelected tyrants on the Supreme Court want to stop all executions while they haggle about the horribly important issue (to them anyway) of the chemical composition of the drug administered to kill him. They are concerned that for the few seconds that it takes to kill him this man (who beat his victim to death) may be distracted from his imminent death by musing about the particular cruelty of one drug versus another in the drug cocktail he is administered. Of course what the tyrants on the Supreme Court are concerned about is minuscule compared to the cruel and unusual punishment he inflicted on his victim, but then the Justices have a simple way of dealing with that. "Screw her, she's dead" was the way Ginzburg, Breyer and Stevens expressed it with their usual liberal level of articulate discourse.