US Supreme Court Clears Way for Arizona Execution

Updated: Tuesday, 26 Oct 2010, 8:55 PM MDT
Published : Tuesday, 26 Oct 2010, 8:22 PM MDT
PAUL DAVENPORT, Associated Press

PHOENIX (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay preventing Arizona from executing an inmate for a 1989 murder on Tuesday evening, clearing the way for the state to execute Jeffrey Landrigan.

The court's 5-4 ruling said a lower court was wrong to block Landrigan's execution because of questions about one of three drugs set to be used. The four liberal justices dissented.

A federal judge in Arizona blocked the execution because the state obtained the drug from a previously unidentified overseas source. The judge questioned whether it might be unsafe.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a ruling early Tuesday, but the nation's high court reversed that decision.

"There is no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug obtained from a foreign source is unsafe," the unsigned order said. "...Speculation cannot substitute for evidence that the use of the drug is 'sure or very likely to cause serious illness and needless suffering."'

Arizona said Tuesday that it got its sodium thiopental from Great Britain, the first time a state has acknowledged obtaining the drug from outside the United States since the shortage began slowing executions in the spring.

Officials at a state prison in Florence have been waiting for the high court's decision all day. The execution had been set for 10 a.m. but a ruling by a federal judge in Phoenix that had been upheld by the appeals court panel had the execution on hold. It wasn't immediately clear when the execution would take place, but witnesses are still in place.

Landrigan, now 50, has been on death row since his 1990 conviction for murdering Chester Dyer of Phoenix in a 1989 killing that prosecutors said part of a robbery.

http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news/ju ... 10-26-2010