That’s great. But this — “The second stay application was not invalid due to untimeliness” — is your opinion, not a fact you observed because you are on the case. It is good to know that you are comfortable with your blatant appeal to judicial activism and wonderful to read that equity has no objective content and so necessarily favors convicted murderers.

I think it’s safe to say that at least five of the justices aren’t ready yet to reach your conclusion either.

Nice to know you think law is about exercise of power; not about application of rules. It explains your improper attitudes. If I were defending an inmate on death row, I would never make a public statement using the phrase “dead wrong”.

Thanks for making my stomach turn.

I won’t argue equities with you. It’s a largely subjective analysis; different people–and different judges–weigh specific facts differently. Needless to say, though, I disagree with your opinion, I think it’s safe to say that at least five of the justices aren’t ready yet to reach your conclusion either. They might later–but only after a closer look.

As to your procedural analysis, though, you’re dead wrong. I’m one of the attorneys on the case; I am very comfortable with my understanding of how and why the case wound through the system in the way in which it did.

Jack

This isn’t true. This is major. Imagine the people this murderer harmed die before this murderer is put to death.

Also, you make an error. The first stay application was dismissed because of the substance of the cert petition that arrived with it; there was nothing about the stay application itself that resulted in its dismissal. You’re conflating procedure and substance here. (And also ignoring that there is no equitable argument for late filing of a claim you had years to file but chose not to.)

There really is no proof of this. They decided against the murderer, but that doesn’t mean their logic was flawed.

Easy. It violated its own rules.

Regardless, the second stay petition was sufficiently timely to and did secure the stay… The second stay application was not invalid due to untimeliness.

The above, sir, is your pedantic opinion. None of the documents you cite to — which I have read — make your case.

The second stay application was granted.

Improperly.

The first stay application was dismissed.

Yes. Which is why the Court must have revived it.

Under “latest developments,” you will see two links to stays in Mississippi cases.

The October 29 link takes you to the order denying the first stay motion. It states that the Mississippi Supreme Court had an independent state ground for denying relief, thereby depriving the United States Supreme Court of jurisdiction. Note the style–Berry v. Mississippi; that tells you that this is the cert from the state post-conviction petition.

Now turn to the second one–October 30. That one is styled Berry v. Epps and others. That tells you that it is the cert from denial of injunctive relief in the federal 1983 action; you sue the person depriving you of your rights, not the state.

(And think about it– how would the Court have revived a petition over which it had no jurisdiction?)

Although the State argued the 1983 action was untimely, and although the district court and the Fifth Circuit agreed with that argument and for that reason refused to stay the execution, SCOTUS neither agreed nor disagreed; SCOTUS did stay the execution, though, until it could consider the cert petition arising out of the federal action.

Laches is an equitable argument. It requires consideration of prejudice suffered by the party raising the defense. Gomez doesn’t change this–it speaks of a strong presumption against a stay, not an irrebuttable presumption. Both the district court and the appeals court failed to consider prejudice to the State of Mississippi in analyzing the issue. In essence, they applied an irrebuttable presumption.

The State’s prejudice is slight–Baze will be decided in months. Maybe this figured into the Court’s decision. At this point, though, we’re doing nothing but reading tea leaves.

Regardless, the second stay petition was sufficiently timely to and did secure the stay; the Court concluded it did not have jurisdiction to act upon the first one.

The second stay application was not invalid due to untimeliness. The second stay application was granted. The first stay application was dismissed.

Yes, exactly. My position — in line with Sean and Kent — is that because the second stay application was invalid due to untimeliness, the Supreme Court must have revived the first one, treating the second cert petition as a substitute for the rejected one. Thus, the second cert petition is not “related to” the first stay application.

I really thought this was obvious.

Justice Stevens dissented in Gomez. The gas chamber was unnecessarily cruel, he said, because “numerous medical, legal, and ethical experts” agreed that lethal injection was the way to go. His source for that statement was the application for stay prepared by Harris’s lawyers at the ACLU’s death penalty project.

The Supreme Court received a cert petition stating that the petitioner is entitled to relief under Section 1983 because the State’s execution protocols violate the 8th Amendment and because the State intended to execute the petitioner under those protocols. Accompanying that cert petition was a motion to stay that referred specifically to THAT cert petition.

The motion to stay, and the Court’s grant of the motion, had nothing to do with an unrelated cert petition. Nothing unrelated was revived.

Are you trying to articulate the opinion that Section 1983 is an improper vehicle for raising an 8th Amendment argument?

I think we all know the difference between “a” and “the”.

The Bounds’ loss is a grave one. No one can make light of that or overlook that. That does not, though, justify scrapping the 8th Amendment. The Constitution does not contain a lowest-common-denominator standard of punishment. Nor should we, as a civilized society, promote one.

Lethal injection is not necessarily a better method of punishment than execution. Veterinarians in some states could not euthanize animals using the lethal injection protocols under scrutiny.

If veterinarians can arrive at a humane means of euthanizing animals, so can states. Nothing in the lawsuits suggests legal punishments should be avoided; the suits simply argue that the punishments must be non-cruel and humane.

Exactly. The Court shouldn’t be shifting around the rules to revive unrelated stay applications just to avoid the imposition of legal punishments.