The US supreme court has intervened to stop Missouri from executing a prisoner with a rare medical condition on the grounds that he could have endured prolonged suffering during the lethal injection process.



The nation’s highest court on Monday agreed to review the case of Russell Bucklew, 49, a convicted murderer who has a large tumor in his throat that is susceptible, experts say, to rupturing and bleeding during the execution – potentially causing him excruciating pain. The justices will consider his predicament in the fall, holding out the prospect that he will not be executed at least for another year.

This is the second time that the nation’s highest court has stepped in at the 11th hour to halt Bucklew’s judicial killing as he was virtually at death’s door. In 2014 the court similarly ordered a stay of execution on the day he was scheduled to be strapped to the gurney.

Shortly before his 2014 brush with death, Bucklew spoke to the Guardian from his cell in death row. He expressed his fears that he would experience terrible pain choking and gagging, and that his family members would have to go through the horrific trauma of watching him suffer.

“My brothers and my friend are going to have to watch that. How much pain is that going to put them through?” he said.

In a petition to the US supreme court last month, Bucklew’s lawyers warned that as a result of his unique medical condition, cavernous hemangioma, which he has had since birth, he was likely to endure terrible suffering during the execution process. “He will experience the sensation of suffering for several minutes, a needlessly prolonged period,” they wrote.

Experts called by the Bucklew legal team in previous stages of his case testified that given the tumor in his throat he was at risk of severe choking and suffocation during the lethal injection. “When Bucklew is supine, gravity pulls the hemangioma tumor into his throat which causes his breathing to be labored and the tumor to rupture and bleed.”

Cheryl Pilate, Bucklew’s lawyer, welcomed the decision of the supreme court to review the case. “Based on Mr Bucklew’s severe medical condition, we believe he would be at substantial risk of extreme and needless suffering during execution by lethal injection,” she said.

There is no doubt surrounding Bucklew’s guilt, or the terrible nature of his crimes, for which he has accepted full responsibility. In 1996 he murdered Michael Sanders, the new partner of his former girlfriend Stephanie Pruitt, and then kidnapped Pruitt and raped her before being arrested after a high-speed chase by police.

Bucklew’s execution, had it gone ahead, would have been the 10th judicial killing in the US this year, and the first for 2018 in Missouri. There have been five executions so far this year in Texas, two in Alabama and one each in Florida and Georgia.

The death penalty has declined steadily since its 1999 peak at the height of the moral panic over urban crime when 98 prisoners were put to death. In 2016 the annual figure fell to 20, rising slightly to 23 last year.

But that does not mean that the legal challenges of state killing has disappeared. Some 2,817 prisoners remain on death row in America, scattered among the 31 states that still adhere to the death penalty.

When they come to consider Bucklew’s case later this year, the nine justices will be looking at whether his special medical condition gives him additional safeguards against a potentially painful death. The current, rather macabre state of the law in the US is that when prisoners protest against the method of execution they are facing on grounds that it might cause them cruel and unusual punishment they have to be able to suggest an alternative death procedure that would be more humane.

In Bucklew’s case, he has proposed that he be killed using lethal gas which he says would cause fewer problems with his tumor. Missouri has the option of death by gas in its protocols, but its gas chamber was demolished years ago; the last time a prisoner was executed by gas in the state was in 1965.