Supreme Court lifts stay, allowing execution of Alabama inmate on Thursday
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday evening lifted a stay of execution granted to an Alabama inmate who joined with other inmates to challenge the use of the sedative midazolam in the death-penalty cocktail.
Inmate Robert Melson, who is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, had been granted a stay by the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, report the Gadsen Times, the Montgomery Advertiser, AL.com and the Associated Press.
The Supreme Court order lifting the stay says Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor would have kept it intact.
Sotomayor had dissented when the Supreme Court allowed the execution of another Alabama inmate to proceed last month.
“I continue to doubt whether midazolam is capable of rendering prisoners insensate to the excruciating pain of lethal injection and thus whether midazolam may be constitutionally used in lethal injection protocols,” she wrote at that time.
Melson had been convicted of the murders of three fast-food restaurant employees during a 1994 robbery.
