Experts: Lethal Injection Will Live On in TX
Although the state of Texas halted an execution at the last minute this week, apparently because of a U.S. Supreme Court challenge over another state’s lethal injection approach, experts expect this won’t change Texas death-penalty practices much in the long run.
Instead, they predict, Texas lethal injections will live on—reformulated, if necessary, to make sure that they don’t cause unnecessary pain, reports the San Antonio Express-News. A Texas appellate court decided Tuesday not to proceed with the scheduled execution yesterday of Heliberto Chi, as discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post.
Even if the Supreme Court were to decide a current Kentucky challenge by determining that the three-chemical cocktail used to execute inmates there is cruel and unusual, the lethal-injection recipe likely would just be changed, predicts David Dow, a Houston lawyer who represents Chi. “I don’t think the Supreme Court’s decision is going to herald the end of capital punishment.”
