The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Why the Supreme Court is fighting over deadly gas and firing squads

For the second time in two months, the GOP-controlled Court handed a victory to a person on death row.

Last week, the Supreme Court handed an unusual — if temporary — victory to an Alabama man on death row. As Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor, writes, this is the first time in over five years that this Court refused to “un-block an execution that a lower court had put on hold,” at least in a case that arose on the Court’s enigmatic shadow docket.

The case, Lovelace v. Lee, involves an utterly ghoulish legal dispute. Alabama was scheduled to execute Jeffery Lee, the inmate at the heart of this case, by asphyxiating him with nitrogen gas. Lee claims that this method of execution will cause him too much suffering, and he filed a lawsuit seeking to be killed instead by a firing squad.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Lovelace is not, however, the only time in recent memory that the Court has ruled in favor of someone on death row. Just last month, the justices decided not to decide Hamm v. Smith, a case that tested the Court’s Republican majority’s commitment to the longstanding principle that people with an intellectual disability may not be sentenced to death.

Although the Court heard oral arguments in Hamm, it ultimately dismissed the case without issuing a decision, thus leaving in place a lower court ruling saving a man from execution.

So what’s going on here? Is the Court growing soft on the death penalty? The short answer is that it is too soon to tell, and the Court’s decision in Lovelace may have been grounded in a procedural concern that Alabama can eventually overcome.

That said, the nondecision in Hamm suggests that at least some of the Court’s Republican members may have made peace with a pair of two-decade-old decisions holding that certain individuals — juvenile offenders and people with intellectual disabilities — may not be executed.

The Lovelace decision, meanwhile, suggests that three more recent Supreme Court decisions, which seemed designed to shut down lawsuits challenging how a state may execute someone sentenced to die, may actually permit those lawsuits to move forward in limited circumstances.

The Roberts Court remains very supportive of the death penalty, and it remains to be seen whether the temporary order in Lovelace amounts to anything more than a fleeting bar to a single execution. But Lovelace should give death row inmates, their loved ones, and capital defense lawyers some hope that, even if they cannot save these inmates’ lives, they may be able to make their executions less brutal.

Hamm and Lovelace are as different as two death penalty cases can be

Though Joseph Clifton Smith, the man on death row in Hamm, and Jeffrey Lee, who........

© Vox