Supreme Court justices like to project an image of collegiality and sobriety to the American public. But that comity often breaks down when the court debates the death penalty. The latest example is Monday’s opinions in Bucklew v. Precythe, which read more like a barroom brawl than a judicial exchange of views.

Russell Bucklew, a Missouri death-row prisoner with a rare medical condition, filed a lawsuit in 2015 to make the state execute him by nitrogen hypoxia. Missouri’s choice of lethal injection, he warned, could force him to die drowning in his own blood. The five conservative justices on the court ruled that he hadn’t met their high threshold for challenging execution methods. The Eighth Amendment, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court, “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death—something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.”

In their dissent, the four liberal justices accused their colleagues of placing judicial convenience over Bucklew’s constitutional rights. “There are higher values than ensuring that executions run on time,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote. “If a death sentence or the manner in which it is carried out violates the Constitution, that stain can never come out.” Justice Stephen Breyer, the court’s foremost critic of the death penalty, laid out the court’s ruling in stark terms. “Bucklew has provided evidence of a serious risk that his execution will be excruciating and grotesque,” he explained. “The majority holds that the State may execute him anyway.”

Between the partisan dogfight to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh last fall and some Democrats’ troubling calls for court-packing this spring, it’s been a bad few months for the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. But the court has done itself no favors in its recent death-penalty rulings. In deciding that Bucklew had no right to an alternative method of execution, the majority does what it increasingly feels like it must do: mangle facts and precedent to keep the machinery of state-sanctioned death rolling. That habit may ultimately do more harm to the court than any external force ever could.

Russell Bucklew was not challenging his conviction in the 1996 murder of a neighbor. (Bucklew’s wife had fled to the neighbor’s home one night after a series of beatings.) Bucklew suffers from cavernous hemangioma, which causes blood-filled tumors to grow throughout his head, neck, and throat and they are too fragile to remove through surgery. His lawyers warned the court that lethal injection could cause the tumors to rupture midway through his execution, filling his lungs with blood and suffocating him.