"Federal judge upholds Missouri execution procedure," is the report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Missouri's lethal-injection procedure is not cruel or unusual punishment, possibly ending a series of lawsuits that kept the state's death chamber closed for nearly three years.
The ruling was issued by U.S. District Judge Fernando J. Gaitan Jr. in Kansas City.
Missouri corrections officials said Tuesday they were preparing to end the life of John Middleton on July 30 as originally scheduled.
The state Supreme Court had granted the convicted killer a reprieve last week, presumably to give the federal court to sort out challenges by five death-row inmates to Missouri's execution protocol.
And:
During a suit by Missouri inmate Michael Taylor, the surgeon who supervised the state's lethal-injection for several years testified that he was dyslexic.
A Post-Dispatch investigation revealed that the surgeon, Alan R. Doerhoff, had been sued for malpractice more than 20 times and publicly reprimanded by the State Board of Healing Arts.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Kentucky's lethal injection protocol, effectively allowing states to resume executions.
Missouri's executions remained stalled while death-row inmate Reginald Clemons and four other inmates argued that Missouri's history of using unqualified personnel in the death chamber could subject the condemned to unconstitutional pain.
After Taylor's suit, Missouri prison officials have said they were no longer using Doerhoff and had hired an anesthesiologist and a registered nurse to work on its execution team.
In filings, the state provided information to the plaintiffs on their licensing, credentials and training, but resisted attempts by Clemons' lawyers to depose the new execution team members.
The Kansas City Star has, "Court upholds Missouri’s revised execution process."
For now, the ruling by U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan Jr. in Kansas City clears the way for the state to resume executions for the first time since 2005, although attorneys for the inmates said they would appeal.
All the attorneys have not met to discuss their options, but one of them, Jennifer Herndon, said they could ask Gaitan to reconsider his decision or take their case to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Herndon said Gaitan’s ruling was unexpected because he had denied the same motion June 30.
In Tuesday’s order the judge said that he reconsidered in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this year that found Kentucky’s similar method of lethal injection to be constitutional.
Gaitan also cited a previous 8th Circuit decision upholding the constitutionality of the lethal-injection protocol that Missouri devised after Gaitan ruled its predecessor was unconstitutional.
And:
Litigation has swirled for years over the three-drug combination that Missouri and most other states use to execute inmates. Critics have said that if not properly done by competent personnel, the method risked undue suffering, which would violate the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Based on standards set by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Kentucky case, members of Missouri’s execution team are “fully qualified to carry out the steps of the execution protocol,” Gaitan ruled.
He noted that the law does not allow inmates facing death to select the most qualified execution team personnel, only that team members have the “requisite experience and are licensed in their field.”
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