Inmates lose execution suit
Posted: 10/26/09 - 12:27:45 pm CDT
JACKSON (AP) — A challenge to Mississippi’s method of lethal injection has been laid to rest for now, more than a year after the state’s most recent execution.
The U.S. Supreme Court this month let stand a Mississippi federal judge’s decision that three death row inmates waited too long to file a lawsuit challenging the combination of three drugs the state uses to execute inmates.
U.S. District Judge W. Allen Pepper’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit came July 15, 2008, only a week before Dale Bishop was executed.
Bishop and three other death row inmates — Alan Dale Walker, Paul Everett Woodward and Gerald James Holland — filed the case. Walker, Woodward and Holland carried the case to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Pepper’s ruling last November.
There is a three-year statute of limitations on filing lawsuits challenging the execution method. Pepper — and the 5th Circuit panel — said the clock begins ticking on the date when direct review of a plaintiff’s conviction and sentence is complete.
For Walker, the clock would have started Dec. 2, 1996; for Woodward, March 29, 1999; and for Holland, Oct. 5, 1998, according to the court.
The three filed the challenge in 2007, well after the deadline, the 5th Circuit panel said. The panel said the inmates were aware that they were subject to execution by lethal injection from the moment their convictions became final. Inmates’ attorneys had hoped the case might have been taken up by the Supreme Court amid a continuing national debate over lethal injection methods.
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said the Supreme Court ruling was expected “based on the fact that the same issue had been taken to the United States Supreme Court from other federal circuits.”
James W. Craig, a Jackson attorney who represented the three inmates, said the case was decided on the issue of time limitations, not lethal injection procedures.
“The Supreme Court did not decide that Mississippi’s procedure for lethal injection was acceptable,” Craig said. “The court only decided when prisoners must file their challenges to the procedure. Some prisoners are still within that period. At some point, a trial will prove that executions at Parchman are likely to suffocate a conscious, paralyzed prisoner to death.”
|
Let us know what you think about this story or topic.
|
Your comment may not
immediately appear on this Web site. We appreciate your patience.
|
|
|
|
|
No kidding wrote on Oct 27, 2009 11:04 AM: