EKB News

The state’s highest court also ruled today that the method of executing prisoners by lethal injection is not cruel or unusual punishment. The Supreme Court, in an unanimous decision released today, affirmed a July 2005 Franklin Circuit Court ruling that upheld the state’s method of executing prisoners. Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr., both convicted double-murderers, challenged the state’s lethal-injection protocol in 2004, saying that it violated their Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. Central to the case, and other cases like it in other states, is whether the three-drug lethal cocktail the state uses for lethal injection is humane.