After SCOTUS lifts stay by 6-3 vote, federal government completes it eighth execution of 2020

As reported here via SCOTUSblog, the "Supreme Court on Thursday night allowed the government to proceed with the execution of Orlando Hall, who became the eighth federal inmate to be put to death since the Trump administration resumed federal executions in July."  Here is more:

Hall was sentenced to death for his role in the kidnapping, rape and murder of 16-year-old Lisa René in 1994.  In a one-sentence order, the Supreme Court lifted a district judge’s last-minute injunction that had temporarily blocked Hall’s execution.  Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented and would have left the injunction in place.

The court also rejected three separate emergency requests filed over the past two days in which Hall asked the justices to postpone his execution.  There were no noted dissents to the three brief orders rejecting those requests.  Shortly after the court’s orders, Hall was put to death at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.  He died at 11:47 p.m., according to local news reports.

Hall’s case reached the Supreme Court after a flurry of litigation in the lower courts over the execution, which the government had scheduled for Thursday at 6 p.m.  On Thursday afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an injunction blocking the execution.  The injunction was based on an earlier finding from Chutkan that the government’s method of execution violates the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act because the government uses a lethal dose of sodium pentobarbital without obtaining a prescription for that drug.

The government immediately appealed Chutkan’s injunction.  The government argued that the prescription requirement in the FDCA does not apply to lethal-injection drugs.  It also argued that Hall was not entitled to an injunction based solely on the lack of a prescription.

The Supreme Court sided with the government, issuing an order just before 11 p.m. that lifted Chutkan’s injunction. The majority did not explain its reasoning, and none of the three justices who noted their dissent wrote an opinion explaining why.  At the same time, the court denied Hall’s three emergency applications, each of which presented separate legal arguments for a postponement of his execution....

Hall’s case was the first case involving a pending execution in which Justice Amy Coney Barrett participated since she joined the bench in October.  Barrett, a devout Catholic, co-wrote a 1998 article on the moral and legal dilemma that Catholic judges face in capital cases due to the church’s opposition to capital punishment.  That article raised questions in her confirmation hearings about possible recusals from such cases.  Barrett cited her full participation in capital cases as a law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia and as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

A few prior recent related posts:

• Pyrrhic victory for federal death row inmates in DC Circuit lethal injection litigation
• Members of Congress urge Attorney General Barr "to suspend all federal executions"
• After Tennessee Gov postpones last scheduled state execution of year, will all three scheduled federal 2020 executions still go forward?