Ghosts of Executions Past: A Case Study of Executions in South Carolina in the Pre-Furman Era

Abstract

During the waning months of the Trump Administration, thirteen persons on federal death row were executed. They all maintained that the lethal injection protocol the federal government intended to use presented an unconstitutional risk of a torturous death. While lower federal courts determined that their allegations deserved additional scrutiny, and in several cases entered injunctions preventing the executions, an exasperated majority of the United States Supreme Court in Barr v. Lee summarily vacated the lower court’s decision and effectively “greenlighted” lethal injection executions if they can be carried out by a single dose of pentobarbital sodium. The Court reasoned that this dosage is widely conceded to render a person “fully insensate” and does not carry the risks of pain that “some have associated with other lethal injection protocols.” Barr is the most recent in a series of decisions by the Court upholding various forms of lethal injection against constitutional attack, and declaring that the federal government and the States, “[f]ar from seeking to superadd terror, pain, or disgrace to their executions,” have attempted to develop new ways to carry out executions that are “less painful and more humane than traditional methods, like hanging, that have been uniformly regarded as constitutional for centuries.

Keywords: Trump Administration, death row, lethal injection, injunctions, United States Supreme Court, Supreme Court, pentobarbital sodium, constitutional attack