Cert. Petition in Lethal Injection Case
on Feb 15, 2006 at 3:04 pm
We are filing this cert. petition today in Abdur’Rahman v. Bredesen, which challenges the constitutionality of Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol. While the Court has been bombarded with a number of lethal injection cases of late, we believe that if the Court is inclined to consider the issue this one is an especially appropriate case for the Court’s review, for a couple of reasons. First, unlike most of the other cases that have sought Supreme Court review, this case is not an eve-of-execution challenge and presents a very well-developed record. Second, the case is not complicated by procedural questions such as whether the challenge to the protocol is a second or successive habeas petition; rather, Abdur’Rahman’s state-law right to bring this federal constitutional claim is uncontested.
Our co-counsel on the brief (and the attorneys responsible for the well-developed record) are Bradley MacLean of Nashville’s Stites & Harbison and Bill Redick. Three of our students — Matt Cooper, Nicholas Degani, and Tim Smith — from the winter term class that we taught at Harvard this year worked extensively on the case.
