U.S. Supreme Court stays Florida execution
The case is the latest showdown over whether lethal injections should be delayed until a key death penalty decision.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 16, 2007 edition
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MIAMI - A Florida death row inmate has been granted a stay of execution by the US Supreme Court in an action that offers further evidence that a de facto national moratorium on executions is in place.
The stay, announced Thursday afternoon, came four hours before Mark Dean Schwab was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m.
Lawyers for Mr. Schwab asked the justices to intervene in light of the Supreme Court's decision in late September to hear a Kentucky case challenging that state's use of a three-drug protocol to carry out executions by lethal injection.
The Schwab case represents the latest showdown over whether pending executions should be postponed until after the Supreme Court has heard and decided the Kentucky case, Baze v. Rees.
Florida uses a similar three-drug protocol and Schwab's lawyers argued that their client's death sentence should be postponed to ensure that Florida's procedures comply fully with any new constitutional requirements that might be announced by the high court in the Kentucky case.
Capital punishment opponents were expecting the execution would be blocked.
"There is no reason to hurry," says Mark Elliott of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. "This person, no matter what happens, is going to die in prison. The only question is when and how."
Officials in Florida had argued that there was no reason to wait. They said they've already solved any constitutional problems by requiring that condemned inmates in Florida be unconscious before two lethal chemicals are injected.
Schwab is on death row for kidnapping, raping, and murdering an 11-year-old boy from Cocoa, Fla., in 1991.
The Florida Supreme Court and other state judges had refused to grant a stay. On Wednesday afternoon, a federal judge in Orlando stopped the execution. Then, on Thursday morning, a federal appeals court panel in Atlanta vacated that stay.
The action moved the case to the US Supreme Court, where both sides had already filed briefs.
In anticipation of the Kentucky case, some 16 executions have been stayed – four of them by the high court itself. No executions have taken place since Sept. 25, but several states – like Florida – have tried.
Analysts point to the stays as proof of a de facto moratorium on lethal-injection executions. Stays have been granted in Kentucky, Texas, Nevada, Virginia, Arkansas, Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Florida.
The next potential showdown could come Dec. 6 with the scheduled execution of Alabama death row inmate Thomas Arthur.
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