Appeals court vacates order halting executions in Mississippi
By Colleen Jenkins
(Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday reversed a decision that halted executions in Mississippi, finding a lower court abused its discretion when it blocked the use of certain lethal injection drugs.
The ruling upholds the three-drug protocol proposed by Mississippi as it and other states struggle to obtain the chemicals needed to enforce the death penalty. But executions in the state are unlikely to restart immediately, according to a lawyer for two death row inmates challenging the protocol.
The inmates will seek further injunctions against the protocol on other legal grounds and could request a review of the case by the full 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, said their lawyer, Jim Craig.
"We haven’t made that decision yet," said Craig, co-director of the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center in New Orleans.
U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate issued a preliminary injunction last August barring Mississippi's corrections department from executing prisoners using compounded pentobarbital or midazolam.
The drugs have been used in botched executions and are not in the class of drugs specified by Mississippi law for lethal injections, convicted murderers Richard Jordan and Ricky Chase argued.
But the three-judge appeals panel on Wednesday found the prisoners failed to show the drugs would impose an "atypical and significant hardship" on them. The appellate judges also rejected an argument that Mississippi's plan to use drugs not listed in state law "shocks the conscience."
"The Fifth Circuit’s ruling affirms my belief that the state is legally and properly administering the death penalty," Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, a Republican, said in a statement.
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood did not immediately comment. Hood, a Democrat, last month said he would ask state lawmakers to authorize executions by firing squad, electrocution, hanging and nitrogen gas when drugs for lethal injections were not available.
Craig said the state should instead model its capital punishment protocol after Texas, where inmates are put to death using a single, overwhelming dose of a barbiturate.
That procedure lowers the risk of lethal injections amounting to chemical torture when things go wrong in the three-drug cocktail, he said.
"They refuse to do that," he said of Mississippi officials.
Mississippi last carried out a lethal injection in 2012.
(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Editing by Tom Brown)
