The US Supreme Court entered a temporary stay to consider Harcourt’s cert petition and application for a stay, but ultimately denied the stay at approximately 8:40PM, over the dissent of Justices Jane Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, and Breyer.
Ginsburg and Sotomayor protested that “The District Court and Eleventh Circuit erroneously premised their rejection of Hamm’s claims on novel understandings about how Hamm’s execution would be carried out—understandings gleaned from a stipulation and an affidavit to which Hamm was given no opportunity to respond. An adversarial process should have tested the risk of “serious illnessand needless suffering,” Glossip v. Gross, 576 U. S. ___, ___ (2015) (slip op., at 12) (quoting Baze v. Rees, 553 U. S. 35, 50 (2008)), presented by the insertion of intravenous catheters into Hamm’s leg or central veins. That method of execution, although it fits within the compass of the State’s execution protocol, has, by all accounts before us,never been tried before in Alabama.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling is here:
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