Alabama executed Christopher Lee Price late Thursday night, sparking a stern warning from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who said Price’s death should be an invitation to rethink the practice altogether.
Price was convicted for the 1991 killing of an Alabama minister.
“A man is much more than his worst mistake,” Price said in his last words before his execution, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.
He had lodged multiple appeals and objections, with the final one being turned down by the high court late last month. In that appeal, he’d argued Alabama’s method of lethal injection would cause him excruciating pain, which he said was a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.
Justice Breyer at the time had said he would have delayed Price’s execution to give a lower federal court a chance to hold a trial in June on whether Price should be able to die by nitrogen hypoxia instead of lethal injection.
On Thursday, as Price was heading for the execution chamber, Justice Breyer weighed in with another opinion chiding colleagues for allowing the execution to continue.
He said Price had a valid Eighth Amendment challenge that should not have been short-circuited.
And he said it’s time the court look for an appropriate case to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty altogether.
Price’s case has exposed a deep dividing line at the high court.
The justices had ruled 5-4 last month that Price’s execution could proceed — but the decision came after Alabama’s death warrant had expired, and it had to delay.
Justice Clarence Thomas seemed to accuse Justice Breyer of “dallying,” saying the court had to wait for Justice Breyer to finish his dissent before they released their opinion, forcing Alabama’s delay.
Justice Thomas said it was unfair to the family of the victim of Price’s crime, who’d come to the prison to see the execution and left without closure.
“To the extent the court’s failure to issue a timely order was attributable to our own dallying, such delay both rewards gamesmanship and threatens to make last-minute stay applications the norm instead of the exception,” Justice Thomas wrote.
But Justice Breyer said the court should have paid more attention to a condemned man’s claims.
“To proceed in this way calls into question the basic principles of fairness that should underlie our criminal justice system,” Justice Breyer wrote in scolding his colleagues.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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