Execution Methods and Deciding Implementation of the Death Penalty - Podcast

During oral argument in Glossip v. Gross, Justice Samuel Alito pointed to what he called "a guerrilla war against the death penalty, which consists of efforts to make it impossible for the states to obtain drugs that could be used to carry out capital punishment with little, if any, pain[.]"  The goal of these efforts, apparently, is to facilitate constitutional challenges to the death penalty by making its implementation more painful.

This teleforum analyzed whether the efforts by death penalty opponents to pressure drug manufacturers to stop supplying drugs for use in execution--resulting in states resorting to execution methods that are more painful--are circumventing the democratic process in debating the death penalty. Specifically, our experts debated the methods used by those in opposition to the death penalty to shut down access to less painful execution methods, the propriety of complicating the death penalty's implementation, the relationship between that complication and constitutional challenges to the death penalty, and whether this amounts to treating the democratic process like a one-way ratchet: only permitting the people to choose more painful means of implementing executions so as to facilitate legal challenges to the death penalty.

• Mr. Kent Scheidegger, Legal Director & General Counsel, Criminal Justice Legal Foundation
• Prof. John Bessler, Professor of Law, University of Baltimore School of Law