Pyrrhic victory for federal death row inmates in DC Circuit lethal injection litigation

As reported in this Courthouse Legal News piece, headlined "Federal Executions on Track but DC Circuit Flags Legal Errors," two federal defendants scheduled to be executed in coming days and weeks got some cold comfort from the DC Circuit today:

Though it declined to block two federal executions, the first just over 24 hours away, the D.C. Circuit was critical Wednesday that seven lethal injections have been carried out in the last few months without medical prescriptions.

This year alone, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has carried out more federal executions than the combined total of his predecessors from the last 57 years. That record has sat undisturbed so far against a litany of challenges to the new lethal-injection protocol unveiled last year by Attorney General William Barr after a 17-year hiatus on the death penalty at the federal level.

Inmates suffered their latest defeat Wednesday morning when the D.C. Circuit declined to stay the executions of Orlando Hall set for Thursday and Brandon Bernard on Dec. 10.

In a rare rebuke from the appeals court as to the government’s death-penalty practices, however, the court revived the inmates’ claims that the government must obtain a prescription before using the drug pentobarbital to kill prisoners....

[In] a September ruling ... U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan found that the Trump administration violated the law by carrying out death sentences with unprescribed pentobarbital, but that Supreme Court decisions foreclosed her from blocking the upcoming executions.

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the first federal execution to proceed this year, overturning a temporary ban that Chutkan had ordered. In her latest ruling, Chutkan concluded that “most of the evidence” brought by attorneys to show flash pulmonary edema grips an inmate while they are still awake was already reviewed by the justices and did not reach the high bar to grant injunctive relief.

But the 2-1 appeals panel ruled Wednesday that Chutkan “should have ordered the 2019 protocol to be set aside to the extent that it permits the use of unprescribed pentobarbital in a manner that violates the FDCA.” Though the court revived the inmates’ Eighth Amendment challenge, it affirmed “denial of a permanent injunction to remedy the FDCA violation.”

Jonathan S. Meltzer, an attorney for Hall, said they would ask the Supreme Court this afternoon to issue a stay. The Justice Department did not respond to whether it plans to bring its own challenge to the Wednesday ruling. Hall has requested to go to the execution chamber at 6 p.m. for his scheduled death on Thursday. He was convicted for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl in 1994.

Bernard, set to be executed next month, was sentenced to death for the killing of two youth ministers at Food Hood. One of his five co-defendants, Christopher Vialva, was the most recent federal prisoner to die by lethal injection, executed by the Trump administration in September.

Lisa Montgomery, bringing a separate lawsuit backed by the ACLU, is scheduled to die on Dec. 8 — two days before Bernard — and would be the first woman executed by the U.S. government since 1953.

The full split panel ruling from the D.C. Circuit is available at this link.