Baze v. Rees ruling

The Baze v. Rees ruling cleared the way for executions to resume after challenges to lethal-injection procedures had raised questions about the drugs states used and how they obtained them. The ruling followed an earlier Supreme Court decision allowing a condemned prisoner to challenge an execution method in a civil-rights case; unlike that procedural victory, Baze left the protocols and drug combinations in place.

The drug shortage

After the Nelson litigation, scrutiny fell on the combinations used in lethal injections. Many states relied on drugs that had been banned for animal euthanasia because they could cause painful, torturous deaths. The drugs were not readily available in the United States, so states began importing them from European manufacturers.

When European producers learned that their drugs were being used in American executions, they stopped making them available. The resulting scarcity drove state correctional authorities to obtain drugs illegally, without following Food and Drug Administration rules governing interstate sales and transfers. Drug raids at state correctional facilities became an unsettling consequence of the effort to keep executions supplied.

The Court's ruling

In Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the execution protocols and drug combinations were not inherently unconstitutional. The decision did not resolve the controversy over how painful the drugs could make an execution; in practical terms, it removed the obstacle that had suspended their use. Executions resumed.

The ruling followed a distinct legal development in the case of David Nelson. Because Nelson had compromised veins, correctional staff could not insert an intravenous line without medical complications. Alabama planned to have untrained staff make a two-inch incision in his arm or groin to locate a vein, without anesthesia. The Court had unanimously allowed Nelson to challenge that proposed method through a civil-rights action. Nelson later died of natural causes, a year after the litigation produced relief. Baze addressed the constitutionality of the protocols and drug combinations more broadly, and its result was different in effect: rather than opening a route to challenge, it allowed executions to proceed.

Resumption and consequences

For Alabama death-row prisoners and the Equal Justice Initiative staff, the resumption meant seventeen executions in thirty months. That pace coincided with extensive litigation for children sentenced to life without parole. Bryan Stevenson traveled to argue cases for condemned children in states including South Dakota, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Arkansas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and California, while the organization continued cases across the South and managed an increasingly demanding Alabama docket.

The ruling thus had consequences beyond the formal question of whether particular protocols were inherently unconstitutional. It returned executions to operation amid drug scarcity and disputed procurement, while intensifying the workload of lawyers representing people facing death and children condemned to die in prison. The shift from a temporary interruption to seventeen executions in thirty months made the Court's decision concrete in the lives of prisoners and the work required to represent them.