US Supreme Court clears way for execution resumption

US Supreme Court clears way for execution resumption

A general view of US Supreme Court in Washington on Thursday. (Reuters photo)
A general view of US Supreme Court in Washington on Thursday. (Reuters photo)

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for President Donald Trump's administration to carry out the first federal executions since 2003, turning away an appeal by four inmates challenging the lethal injection protocols due to be used.

The justices left in place a lower court ruling that had let the executions proceed. The condemned men, convicted in federal courts of murder, had appealed after the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on April 7 threw out a judge's injunction that had blocked the executions.

The inmates — Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, Alfred Bourgeois and Dustin Honken — are scheduled for execution in July and August at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The brief court order said two of the four liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, favoured hearing the appeal.

Lee, a white supremacist, is due to be the first executed, on July 13. He was convicted in Arkansas in the suffocation deaths carried out with an accomplice of a gun dealer, the man's wife and her eight-year-old daughter in 1996.

While some individual states have continued to carry out executions of inmates convicted in their courts, the US government has not conducted an execution since 2003 during the administration of President George W. Bush amid protracted litigation over the practice.

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