In January, executions in two states seemed to go awry. An Oklahoma inmate’s last words, 12 seconds after he was injected with lethal chemicals, were: “I feel my whole body burning.” A week later, an Ohio inmate “struggled, made guttural noises, gasped for air and choked for about 10 minutes before succumbing to a new, two-drug execution method,” according to The Columbus Dispatch.

In light of those developments, what the new challenges are asking for is modest. They want information to use in making their arguments, which may well fail.

“Either this is unreasonably painful or it’s not,” said Elizabeth Unger Carlyle, who represents a group of death row inmates in Missouri. They have asked the Supreme Court for help after Judge Bye’s court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, erected what they say is a perverse hurdle.

Before the inmates can be told what chemicals the state means to use to kill them, the court said, they must first propose an acceptable alternative method for their own executions.

That macabre requirement creates “a severe and darkly ironic conflict” for lawyers, according to a supporting brief in the case, Zink v. Lombardi, No. 13-8435.

“The principal goal of any lawyer representing a death row client is to prevent his client’s execution,” said the brief, filed by a law school clinic at Yale called the Ethics Bureau. The appeals court, it said, “would require the lawyer to actively advocate for a particular means of achieving his client’s death in the course of attempting to avert it.”

In a Supreme Court filing last week, Missouri officials said that requiring death row inmates to specify how they were to be executed was contemplated by the Supreme Court in its 2008 decision in Baze v. Rees, which upheld Kentucky’s use of what was then the standard three-drug mixture used in most executions.