The execution of a Missouri death row inmate was put on hold on Tuesday night after a stay was granted, lifted and then reinstated by successive court rulings.



Earlier on Tuesday a federal appeals court had initially granted a 60-day stay of execution for Russell Bucklew, a Missouri death row inmate who had been scheduled to die at midnight despite warnings from medical experts that he could be subjected to a prolonged and excruciatingly painful death.

With a few hours to go until the execution, the full panel of the same court – the eighth US circuit court of appeals – lifted the stay, clearing the way for the lethal injection to take place. But attorneys for Bucklew then successfully appealed to the US supreme court. Justice Samuel Alito, who handles emergency matters for the eighth circuit, granted the second stay, setting the stage for the full court to hear the case later on Wednesday.

The initial stay granted by the US appeals court for the eighth circuit had come as a strong rebuff to Missouri which for the past seven months has been pursuing an aggressive executions policy in which it has carried out a judicial killing every month and imposed a ring of secrecy around its supplies of lethal injection drugs.

In a 2 to 1 majority ruling appeal court judges Michael Melloy and Kermit Bye wrote that Bucklew’s medical condition was such that he faced “sufficient likelihood of unnecessary pain and suffering beyond the constitutionally permissible amount inherent in all executions. Quoting previous opinions from the US supreme court, they found that the prisoner was at "objectively intolerable risk of harm" in that Missouri’s planned method of killing him was “sure or very likely to cause ... needless suffering".

Cheryl Pilate, one of his team of attorneys, said in a statement after the first stay: "We are deeply relieved that the panel of the eighth circuit court of appeals has granted a stay of execution for Russell Bucklew, who faced substantial risk of a prolonged, tortuous execution tonight due to his rare and serious medical condition.”

The court judgments came as the fall-out of the botched execution of Clayton Lockett by Oklahoma on 29 April continued to have repercussions across death penalty states. In that case the prisoner took 43 minutes to die in a gruesome spectacle denounced by Barack Obama as “deeply troubling”.

Bucklew, 46, was to be the next person put to death in the US after Lockett. He was sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of Michael Sanders and for the kidnap and rape of his former girlfriend, Stephanie Pruitt.

The case is likely to have consequences beyond Missouri in the highly fractious debate over how death penalty states conduct the business of judicial killing. At least 13 have introduced measured designed to keep the source of their lethal injection drugs secret, in a bid to keep tenuous supply lines open in the face of a biting European-led boycott of drug sales to US departments of correction.

In granting their stay, the three federal judges found that Bucklew had been subjected to a form of Catch-22. The state had argued, and a federal district court agreed, that in order to convince the courts to impose a stay of execution, the prisoner had to be able to offer a feasible alternative method of execution than the one to which he was objecting.

Yet, the judges point out, the state had systematically resisted Bucklew’s efforts to obtain medical examinations that would be needed to come up with such an alternative. The state had also blocked any funding for such medical advice.

Bucklew has a rare congenital condition known as cavernous hemangioma, causing malformations of the veins in his face, head and throat that could easily rupture during the execution. Given the nature of his illness the appeal court found that it was “reasonable” to conjecture that “there is a substantial and serious risk of excruciating pain if Bucklew were to be subjected to Missouri's execution protocol”.

It also concluded that weighing the potential agony Bucklew would suffer on the gurney against the state’s desire to carry out an execution on schedule, the “irreparable harm to Bucklew is great in comparison to the harm to the state from staying the execution”.

The ruling added to the sense of crisis within the death penalty system in the US prompted initially by the global boycott of lethal injection drugs. This is the second pending execution to be stayed in the past three weeks because of legal concern about the process of putting death row inmates to death.

After Lockett’s death, Oklahoma pushed back the execution of Charles Warner by six months. He had been set to die immediately after Lockett in a very rare double execution.

The jitters spreading through the system have prompted Obama to order a review by the department of justice into the procedure for carrying out executions across the 32 states that still officially practise the ultimate punishment.