Jackson Free Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Missouri appeal over whether lethal injection would violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment could delay a Mississippi case over similar issues.

Lawyers for some death row inmates in Mississippi are asking a federal judge to postpone an August trial on Mississippi's death penalty procedures. They say state Attorney General Jim Hood doesn't oppose the delay.

If U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate agrees, no executions in Mississippi are likely until after the Missouri case is decided. Arguments in the Missouri case are set for this fall, and a ruling might not come until 2019. Mississippi hasn't executed anyone since 2012, in part because of legal challenges to the state's lethal injection methods, as well as the state's difficulty in obtaining drugs.

The U.S. Supreme Court in April agreed to review the Missouri case, brought by an inmate named Russell Bucklew. The inmate says his rare medical condition could cause him to choke on his own blood during an execution. The court blocked Bucklew's execution in March after he argued that a tumor in his throat is likely to rupture and bleed during the administration of the drugs that would be used to kill him.

Both the Missouri and the Mississippi cases hinge on what an inmate must do to show an alternate execution method is available that would reduce risk of needless suffering. That's required to meet a previous Supreme Court ruling that says inmates challenging a method of execution must show that there's an alternative that is likely to be less painful. In the Mississippi case, inmates are arguing they should be put to death using a single large dose of a barbiturate called pentobarbital.

Mississippi prison officials have said they're not going to use pentobarbital anymore because they can't obtain the drug after manufacturers opposed to its use in executions cut off supplies. But lawyers for the Mississippi inmates argue that doesn't make any sense because Texas, Missouri and Georgia continue to execute inmates using pentobarbital that they're obtaining from somewhere.

Lawyer Jim Craig, who represents some of the inmates, said it would be a waste of time to have a trial when the Supreme Court is likely to clarify the law at issue.

Death row inmates in the Mississippi case include Richard Jordan, sentenced for kidnapping and killing a Harrison County woman in 1976; Ricky Chase, sentenced for the 1989 killing of a 70-year-old vegetable salesman in Copiah County; Thomas Loden, sentenced for the 2000 kidnapping, rape and murder of an Itawamba County waitress; Roger Thorson, sentenced for killing a former girlfriend in Harrison County in 1987; and Robert Simon, sentenced for the 1990 killings of three members of a Quitman County family.

The Missouri case is Bucklew v. Precythe , 17-8151.