WASHINGTON (CN) — In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Georgia death row inmate can challenge the state’s lethal injection protocol under federal civil rights law.
Reversing a decision from the 11th Circuit, the high court remanded the case of Michael Wade Nance, a convicted murderer who claims lethal injection, the Peach State’s only legal method of execution, would constitute cruel and unusual punishment due to his severely compromised veins.
According to Nance, his veins are likely to “blow” during the execution, causing leakage of the lethal injection drug into the surrounding tissue and thereby resulting in “intense pain and burning.” He also alleges that due to his longtime use of a prescription drug for back pain, the sedative used in the state’s lethal injection protocol may fail to “render him unconscious and insensate.”
As an alternative to lethal injection, Nance proposed death by firing squad—a method currently approved by four other states that permit the death penalty, but not Georgia.
The 11th Circuit rejected Nance’s claims brought under a federal civil rights law known as Section 1983, finding that a habeas corpus petition is the proper procedural motion for method-of-execution challenges. The Atlanta-based appeals court held Nance’s habeas claim was procedurally barred.
The Supreme Court overturned that decision Thursday, ruling that a civil rights suit is the appropriate avenue for advancing Nance’s claims.
Writing for the five-member majority, Justice Elena Kagan pointed to the court’s 2019 decision in Bucklew v. Precythe that found a prisoner can request an alternative execution method that is allowed in other states.
Kagan noted Section 1983 and the federal habeas statutes are very similar in that both laws allow prisoner complaints of unconstitutional treatment by state officials, but she said habeas cases are appropriate when the relief sought would “necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction or sentence.”
The majority agreed with Nance that he is not challenging the validity of his death sentence because he is providing Georgia with a “feasible, readily implemented” alternative method for execution.
“Nance’s requested relief still places his execution in Georgia’s control. If Georgia wants to carry out the death sentence, it can enact legislation approving what a court has found to be a fairly easy-to-employ method of execution,” wrote Kagan, a Bill Clinton appointee.
The ruling states that one of the purposes of Section 1983 is to “override—and thus compel change of—state laws when necessary to vindicate federal constitutional rights.”
After robbing a bank and fleeing, Nance fatally shot a man in an attempted carjacking in Gwinnett, Georgia, in 1993. A jury convicted Nance of murder and he was sentenced to death in 1997, when electrocution was the state’s primary method of execution.
“The State has legislated changes to its execution method several times before,” Kagan wrote. “Other States have regularly done the same, often in an effort to make executions more humane.”
On remand, the 11th Circuit must address the question of whether Nance’s civil rights claims were filed in time.
Kagan was joined in the majority by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Brett Kavanaugh.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett penned the dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.
In Barrett’s view, inmates must file habeas petitions to challenge their method of execution if a ruling in their favor would stop the state from executing them.
“Nance asked the District Court to ‘enjoin the Defendants from proceeding with [his] execution . . . by a lethal injection,’ claiming that the use of such method would violate the Eighth Amendment as applied to him. But lethal injection is the only method of execution authorized under Georgia law,” she wrote. “Thus, if Nance is successful, the defendants in this case—the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections and the warden—will be powerless to carry out his sentence.”
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