Idaho halted the execution of serial killer Thomas Eugene Creech on Wednesday after medical team members repeatedly failed to find a vein where they could establish an intravenous line to carry out the lethal injection. Creech, 73, has been in prison half a century, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more. Creech, one of the longest-serving death row inmates in the U.S., was wheeled into the execution chamber at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution on a gurney a
The supreme Court ruled that due to the wording, the punishment must be both cruel and unusual. This is for sure cruel, but it’s not weird enough
Literally nothing is unusual if u do it enough times.
And the way they determine “unusual” is by doing this absolutely ahistoric, arbitrary polling of current policy. They cherry pick whatever statistics serve the politics of the person writing the decision.
e.g., when ruling whether it was “unusual” to execute people with cogitative disabilities (Atkins v. Virginia), they did a tally of how many states allowed execution in these cases vs did not but deliberately omitted how many states do not allow ANY executions. Then concluded that slightly more states allow executions of the mentally unfit than don’t even though it was absolutely incontestable fact that the vast majority of states did not allow this kind of execution.
Ignore that the ruling technically banned those executions… because it factually didn’t, since it left it up to states to define cognitive disability however they pleased and the behavior of the kill-happy states was not affected by the ruling.