As a follow-up to the posting about the recent Chancery Court decision involving the constitutionality of the State's execution methods, the Tennessee Supreme Court today issued four stays of execution for defendants Stephen Michael West, Billy Ray Irick, Edmund Zagorski, and Edward Jerome Harbison. Soon after the Chancery Court ruling was announced, the State filed a response that it had changed its execution policies to determined whether an inmate was rendered unconscious. The Courts deemed this insufficient, and it granted stays of execution while the defendants' attorneys present arguments or evidence to the trial court about the revised protocol. The trial court has been ordered to issue its decision within ninety days.
Coincidentally, this follows on the footsteps of Justice John Paul Stevens speaking out in a very public way about the decisions he helped create while on the US Supreme Court. He is known for speaking out against the death penalty, saying the Supreme Court's decisions had "dismantled death-penalty safeguards," which created a judicial system that is "shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics, and tinged with hysteria."
Let's see how this plays out . . . unfortunately, a man's life is on the line.
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