USA Today – Supreme Court denies case on death penalty drugs
Richard Wolf and Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY 11:45 a.m. EDT April 7, 2014
WASHINGTON — As states scramble to find drugs needed to carry out executions, the Supreme Court won’t decide for now whether condemned prisoners deserve to know how they will die.
The justices denied a hearing Monday to a Louisiana inmate who asked that state officials tell him what lethal-injection drugs they have planned for his demise.
The case would have put the court squarely at the center of a life-and-death debate over the constitutional rights of even the most depraved killers to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment.